I loved school as a kid. It got me away from the stresses of the house and into a place where I was free to indulge in my love for reading and learning. While the social dynamics of the playground are rarely easy for any of us to navigate, school opened my mind to possibilities, to a world I couldn’t have imagined from within the fear-filled confinement of a dysfunctional family. What I loved most, more than free time in the library or the hours we spent huddled on the floor as the teacher read aloud, was Show and Tell. While, I know that giving presentations was a part of all grades, I remember Show and Tell in grade one best.

Mine was an open-concept school, wherein the grade one class was an amalgamation of two classrooms and two teachers. We sat at tables of six students rather than individual desks, and you had to wait patiently for the weekly Show and Tell presentations to come around to your table. The wait was gruelling and I would spend the weeks and days before my turn came up assessing the contents of my room, searching for the perfect thing — the thing I loved most — full of the hopeful anticipation of the moment when I would have the opportunity to share it with the class. There was so much that I couldn’t share and say as a kid, so many silences that needed to be observed carefully; pain and joyfulness that I could not reveal. Show and Tell was sometimes fraught with fear and anxiety, but overall it was a safe context in which I could reveal myself.

Jump ahead, oh, a few decades or so, and here I am doing a job that in many ways feels a lot like Show and Tell. The only difference being that instead of holding up an item of someone else’s making and proclaiming, “Here I am. This is me. This is what I love.” I have encapsulated it (me) within a creation that came from my own heart, mind, eyes, and hands. All of the hopeful joy, excitement, anxiety and fear is still a part of it.

In order to keep making things I need them to sell. Unfortunately, I am not the world’s greatest self-promoter. I may have loved presenting things in grade school, but as an adult, I find no joy or comfort in showing off my own work. Talking about it makes me sweat. It makes me feel slimy and narcissistic. I pretty much hate it.

So here I am, less than two weeks left until my third book, “Easy Growing: Organic Herbs and Edible Flowers from Small Spaces” goes out into the world and I am feeling the usual mix of emotions: excitement meets nausea. The trick I’ve found, and the one I am struggling to employ again is to focus on the making part of the process. I think back to the good times I had while I was imagining what this book would be. I recall in my mind the times I spent in the garden planting, taking pictures, harvesting, and testing recipes. I try to tap into my child brain and ask myself how she would feel and what she would say while standing up in front of the class with this book in hand.

I think she would like it very much. I think she would say, “Here I am. This is me. This is what I love.”

I hope you like it, too.

———–

My publisher, Clarkson Potter, has agreed to do a prelaunch giveaway of two copies of the book. I thought that in the spirit of my story it would be fun to make it a Show and Tell of sorts.

To Enter:

Simply post a comment via the box below. Please be sure to use a valid email address as I will be using that to contact the winners.

Please include a comment or link to a photo or post online of a plan or plans that you have this year that include herbs or edible flowers. It can be a picture or post about your garden from the last season, your garden as it is right now, or a garden grown by someone else. Garden season is underway for some and on the horizon for the rest of us. Let’s inspire each other and get excited about the forthcoming growing season!

If you’re feeling uninspired or uncomfortable sharing, you can always just type in, “Count me in” or something similar and that will work as your entry.

I will choose 2 winners at random on Friday, February 3, 2012 at 6pm EST.
Please note that this contest is only open to addresses in Canada and the Continental USA. (Sorry.)

Any therapist or self-help guru will tell you upfront, you can’t get into a relationship thinking that you can change the other person. They will tell you that this is an exhausting, destructive predicament that will lead to heartbreak rather than the outcome that you had wished for. They will warn you off of making a further commitment. So will your best friend, your mom, and your great aunt Jean.

Yesterday, I learned that the National Wildlife Federation has aligned with Scotts, the company responsible for manufacturing several garden and agricultural toxins, including Miracle Gro and Roundup. Those of you who are familiar with this beloved environmental protection group will likely have the same reaction that I did. How? How can they champion for the environment with a massive environmental polluter as a beneficiary?

Where was their great aunt Jean when they needed her?

I don’t always hold myself back before making snap assessments and judgements, and it was in the spirit of hearing how they could possibly justify this partnership that I tuned in at 1pm EST today to watch and listen as NWF CEO Larry Schweiger spoke live and online about the decision and what it means for the future of the organization forward. Although the presentation left me cold and disappointed, I can’t say I was surprised to hear a whole lot of spin as well as some pretty conflicting talking points. Like anyone that has entered into a bad relationship with the misguided assumption that they can affect change from the inside, it seems as if the NWF have their head in the clouds and don’t really know what in the hell they are doing.

To add further insult to injury, I was informed via Twitter later this afternoon that they had rearranged their Facebook page [note that my link takes you inside, beyond the splash page] so that you have to switch views to see the plethora of dissenting comments and making it a more convoluted process to add a comment. Tricksy. The message is clear, “We care what you, our members and supporters think about this partnership. Psych!”

So many people have already eloquently and passionately written about this debacle, including The Native Plants & Wildlife Gardens website that has published two very thorough posts on this case. [1 | 2]

I urge you to read the exhaustive background information that they’ve provided as well as some of the writers below. And as always your thoughts on this are very welcome in the comments below.

Further Reading:

• Follow some of the discussion on Twitter via the #NWF hashtag.
• Margaret at Away to Garden has a discussion going. This comment in particular makes a good point about the state of the gardening industry as it relates to sponsorship by chemical giants like Scotts.
• Benjamin Vogt has written a very heartfelt summary of why this is important.

UPDATE:

Today’s Columbus Dispatch has published a piece revealing that Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. plead guilty to charges that between 2005 and 2008 it sold 73 MILLION UNITS of bird seed coated in insecticides that are, “extremely toxic to fish and toxic to birds and other wildlife.”

“Documents state that Scotts continued to sell the products despite warnings in the summer and fall of 2007 from a pesticide chemist and an ornithologist, both of whom worked for the company.“

Please see The Columbus Dispatch and SafeLawns.Blog for more.

All of this follows on the extremely well-timed heels of a Scotts & National Wildlife Federation “Save the Songbird” campaign that includes on location events and social media outreach that began to appear on Twitter just two days ago. Since Scotts knowingly sold millions of units of a toxic poison that was then unknowingly distributed across North American backyards, I wonder: Are Scotts really interested in “saving the songbirds” or saving their dirty image and making a buck?

This also leads us back to the National Wildlife Federation’s defence of this partnership as a chance to affect change within the Scotts Miracle-Gro Co. How can a company that knowingly sells a product that is toxic to the very wildlife it claims to nurture and support, be seen as poised to make changes that could hurt their bottom line?

For more on this story, see Treehugger and The National Wildlife Association CEO Larry Schweiger’s open letter.

The trip to Rancho la Puerta begins and ends at the San Diego airport. This was my first time to Southern California, and since it turned out to be cheaper (due to the New Year travel rush) to stay a few days in San Diego than fly home straight away, we took advantage to enjoy a bonus day and a half in the city.

Having now had a chance to see first hand what gardening is like in Southern California, I can say with authority that I would move there in a heartbeat to enjoy that luscious, long-season growing. I spent the last few minutes before we had to head to the airport running from one neglected front yard citrus tree to the next screaming (mostly on the inside), “Dear god, look at all of these oranges!”

If it were not for the state of traffic and poor public transportation options, I would be cranking up the Zeppelin and packing my bags right now. I can’t live in a car dependent city, never mind the fact that my stomach was in my throat every time we got on the road. Since I’m being honest, the earthquakes freak me out a bit, too.

This garden was the first I saw when we arrived at our hotel. You’ll recognize the large clumps of blooming bird of paradise (Strelitzia). It seems to grow like a weed here and I noticed that it was a public garden planting favourite. But the real show-stopper, the plant that I could almost leave my bike-riding, public transportation utopia for is the giant Dr. Suess-like Fox Tail Agave (Agave attenuata).

My god, that is the most phenomenal agave I have ever seen in my life! Alas, I try my best to keep my little collection of potted agaves healthy, but what I wouldn’t give to grow a massive cluster like this.

There are several benefits to living and gardening in a southern climate, but it’s the promise of a killer agave garden that gets to me most.