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Resolved. Keep Garden Journal. Label Plants.

© Barbara M. Martin

January is the perfect month to start your own personal garden journal and devise a plant labeling scheme you can live with. These will be critical tools in the coming months and years as you and your garden progress. Somehow, the journal and the labels go together, those orderly little detail-oriented things that keep us on track when we forget three years hence which cultivar is which or when we last double dug the perennial bed!

For the journal, a sturdy notebook will do. Just make sure you like the cover because you will have it around for years and years.

I think a three ring binder makes a good journal. You can add pockets and sleeves to it as needed to hold the inevitable collection of clippings from magazines, photocopies from books, handouts from lectures and garden tours and plant nurseries, sketches on stray sheets of paper and memory-jogger photos and reams of muddy design notes and, well, whatnot. Maybe even a few pressed flowers and ribbons from the county fair.

Perhaps a shoe box might be good, too. Hard to say whether the garden journal is more a log book document or more memento.

On the other hand, a real honest to goodness bound book feels nicer. The thick bundle of new pages seems like a world ready to explore and unfold, little by little or maybe in a good year chapter by chapter. A fine one would have gilt edges and a ribbon for marking the page.

I need a new journal. When I get a new one, I always skip ahead and make up new sections almost randomly so the book will seem lived in right away. Sections with grand titles like "ROSES" and "BULBS" and "TREES" and "HERBS" and later, little add-ons starting just inside the back cover. These run from back to front and have terse little titles like: "flops".

My old journal is too small and the spine is broken. It has all of the above plus old seed packets and the little full color glossy info sheets that come with bulbs in the fall instead of real labels -- somehow I seem to think saving the little slips of paper will help me figure out which variety of red tulip or yellow daffodil is which when they come up in the spring; not that I actually believe that mind you, but at least I can riffle through the card collection and anticipate them coming up and blooming when there is a horrible thick wad of the white stuff outside and no sign of dirt let alone plants.