MAKING A GARDEN NOTEBOOK 
LUCY ELLIOT KEELER 
Author of “Flowers in a Crannied Wall” (G. M. Mar., 1922), “My Gailant Garden of Earliest Spring” (G. M. Sept., 1921) 
T HE importance of a record of one’s plants and a diagram 
of their location is one of the early lessons in the career 
of the amateur gardener. After pottering with such 
a garden notebook for many years, I have worked out 
a plan which may prove suggestive to others. More¬ 
over the making of the garden book is next best fun to the mak¬ 
ing of the garden; while the combination, in one handy volume, 
of a garden record and history, address book, sketch book, 
check book and ledger is a satisfaction beyond words. 
Get, then, a student’s blank book, about 7x8 inches in size, 
with at least 100 pages, unpaged, and (to simplify charting) cross 
ruled in the j or f inch mesh. 
Using the second and third pages as one, make a diagram of 
your entire plot. Draw the outline of the house, porches, and 
any outbuildings in black ink; the flower borders around house 
and fences and the detached beds in red ink; with each border 
and bed numbered plainly in black. The numbers should run 
as consecutively as possible. I begin at my front entrance, go 
around the house, next the fence borders, and then the detached 
beds. 
Devote the next pair of pages to your I able of Contents, the 
separate items of which are the number and name of each sec¬ 
tion of border or bed. Then devote a pair of pages, always 
opposite, to each section, writing the number and name plainly 
at the top. 1 will refer to “name” later. 
Devote the right hand page to the diagram of that section, 
and the left hand page to the list of its contents. Make the 
diagram as large as the page will conveniently allow, marking 
points of compass. Let the top be north where it is convenient, 
though where a border is against a wall or fence that will natur¬ 
ally be the top. The diagram should be made with care, using 
ink and a fine pen to write in the names of plants. I enter 
shrubs and bulbs in red ink, leaving the black for perennials, 
and use the corresponding colors in tabulating items on the 
opposite page. Lead pencil serves for annuals and temporary 
seedlings. 
On the left hand pages give one or more lines to each shrub, 
plant, vine, or variety of bulb, giving botanical as well as com¬ 
mon name. With each item put the date of acquisition and 
source, with price paid. I often supplement this by pasting in 
place the brief item cut from the nursery catalogue. 1 also 
note here bits of lore connected with plants 1 have inherited: 
“ Mme. Plantier Rose, brought from Vermont by my mother 
in 1857”; “Napoleon 111 , raised from a cutting from one 
on Washington’s grave which in turn came from Napoleon’s 
at St. Helena”; “Old Noisette Rose given me by Mme. 
Severance who remembered as a child when Cleveland had 
less than 600 inhabitants”; “Johnny Appleseed planted the 
Greening Apple tree.” 
After each pair of diagrams and list-pages leave the fol¬ 
lowing pair blank for future revision. 
I HAVE found it highly convenient as 
well as amusing to myself and my 
friends, to name my beds, some from 
the location, as “library bed,” “kitchen 
bed;” or from shape, as “the triangle,” “the crescent”; or 
from some dominant occupant as in the case of the “quince 
bed,” where an ancient Quince tree forms the apex; the 
“old wall,” “new wall,” etc. Some are more storied. “Blue 
monkey” refers to the north third of the long “monkey 
border,” so-called because a circus monkey, escaping, took 
refuge there; “pink monkey” to the middle section; “yel¬ 
low monkey,” south, each denoting the general complexion 
of flowers blooming therein. When 1 acquire a new Del¬ 
phinium, for instance, it gravitates almost of itself to the 
back of “blue monkey,” just as a new Helenium betakes itself 
to “yellow monkey.” “Czecho-Slovakia” is inevitably the 
home of the Oriental Poppies, Monarda, Gaillardia, Jerusalem 
Cross, croceum and Tiger Lilies, a difficult hotch-potch, made 
homogeneous, and almost harmonious with the rest of the 
garden, however, by quantities of Sweet Rocket, Gypsophila, 
and herbaceous Spireas. “ Botany Bay,” in a sheltered cove 
near the cistern, incarcerates roamers, rampers, plants on proba¬ 
tion and near convicts! 
As time has enlarged my collections I have found it useful to 
have lists of certain plants together, and the rear pages of the 
book are devoted to these; one to my many varieties of Iris, 
their names, location, colors, and dates of bloom; another to 
Spireas, both shrubby and herbaceous; one to hardy Ferns; and 
another to Evergreens, wee seedlings which I am constantly 
bringing home from mountains or nurseries, to cherish and 
tend till some special spot calls for one of them. 
E VERY summer and fall 1 check over some of the lists and 
diagrams, marking plants that have died or been moved to 
other quarters, briefly noting times of bloom, special treatment 
taught by experience, etc.; but to keep the book readable at 
a glance details must be subordinated. By checking each 
year with a different colored pencil, dated at the top of the 
page, the accuracy of the bed’s contents can be at once 
detected. 
When the years and many changes have made any chart 
crowded or confused, 1 blue pencil the whole page, and on the 
pair of pages immediately following make a total revise. Oc¬ 
casionally the whole book goes through this process. My 
present third volume celebrates its decennial next summer, 
and is then promised a successor. Each book should, of course, 
be dated on the front cover. 
The reader will see that such a garden book, growing up 
gradually into an accurate record of one’s acquisitions, failures, 
successes, financial dispensations, intercourse with dealers and 
experts, garden statistics, and one’s own state of mind, becomes 
the garden’s veritable alter ego. With it the owner can play 
and plot, embellish and improve, in the evening, in winter, in 
days of storm, in hours of weakness, in weeks of illness, in very 
absence from home itself. Mostly, 
mine walks the garden with me. 1 
question it, 1 mutter to it, 1 leave 
my thumb marks on all its pages. Of 
all my shelves of garden literature, this 
volume is my vade mecum. 
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