My wife is a knitter. When she took this up four or five years ago, I had no idea how all-consuming knitting often becomes. It starts simply, then mushrooms into a world full of yarn, patterns, and more needles than one ever imagined existed. Replace knitting with gardening and yarn with seeds, and I think anyone reading this can relate to such obsessions. I'm very happy for her that she found this, and am always impressed by her dedication and the quality of her products. She seems to have some talent for this.

As with any hobby, one predictable manifestation of the knitting obsession, would be, of course, a profusion of knitting blogs. Indeed, there are thousands, or perhaps tens of thousands. What I find fascinating, however, even as a non-knitter, is that there are a number of blogs where knitting may be the origin of the blog, but the writing and themes soon transcend that and venture into the world of plain good writing. Knitting is woven throughout the posts (bad pun, sorry), perhaps, but they can be read and enjoyed by non-knitters as well. Two of the best examples from this genre are the Yarn Harlot and the Panopticon. While I often glaze over at their posts which are more or less only about knitting, they then toss in a post like this (that random knitter in London is my wife) or this, and as a reader I'm hooked.

It occurred to me the other day that as a gardener, and one who writes for a blog (and for a bunch of other blogs, for that matter), that I couldn't even begin to name a gardening blog that resembles either of those knitting blogs conceptually. Gardenaut comes really close at times, and my fellow Gardenauts write beautifully, and with humor, about their gardens and mishaps. But the goal here is to offer a range of voices and to focus on the practical, the useful, and the procedural, not hone in on a single life and gardening's impact on it.

There are scads of people blogging about their gardens, but when most stop talking about the particulars of growing this or that, their musings tend to center around chronicling how one has unplugged from the mainstream and gone organic, or describing how digging in dirt soothes the soul. All good stuff, but I want more. Where are the good writers who happen to use gardening as their point of entry into the world of letters? Who takes their garden as their muse?

Search engines aren't much help in finding blogs like this. They don't have categories such as "good writing" or "about this, sort of, but offers more." It takes a lot of hunting and reading to track them down. Surely the best way to find these things is by word of mouth, so, dear reader, please share your favorite gardening blog (even if it's your own) that expands beyond the particulars of gardening and shows readers how it informs your life and thought. I just know these literary gardeners must be out there!