Photograph Your Garden This Year

Keeping a garden record book is not a new thing, gardeners across the world note down when they sow seeds, plant bulbs and when crops flourish or flowers bloom. Never before though has it been as easy to record the progress in your garden in a visual way, literally, at the touch of a button and this will be wonderful way this year to help you monitor the progress of the outside world!

I cannot shout enough about the value of photographing your garden regularly! I always have my phone in my pocket or garden caddy when I’m in the garden and I will stop to catch the sunlight dancing briefly on a flower; a solitary bee hopping between flowerheads; the colours of the Summer flowers; a lone raindrop balancing on a leaf, the unfurling of a new season.

As well as the beauty of the garden, I am also a practical recorder, as a photograph often serves better than my memory as to where bulbs were planted; which shade a particular flower is; what height a perennial gets to and when the onion sets peeped through.

By far though, one of the best reasons for photographing your garden regularly is to serve as an aide memoire for your future planning. It can be hard when you look out at brown, withered borders in the bleak mid-Winter to recall the glory days of Summer and to remember just how gorgeous your little patch of green was. It is all too easy come Spring to start to turn over borders, even dig in new plants, only for those dormant perennials or bulbs to pop up and your hard work is ruined with crashing plants.

Use your photographs to record the progress you make year on year as it is often very hard to recall how bare an area looked until you dug in a border.

It is also a wonderful thing to look back at your fabulous Summer garden pictures and take a moment to revel in the success of what you created and shaped. I do sometimes look back at pictures and feel immense pride in how good the garden looked in that moment, on that day, in that month.

This year, I am going to attempt to photograph my garden at the beginning of each month so I can look back at the end of the year and compare the growth and beauty of the garden month on month. It’s one of my #gardeninggoals. Why don’t you take five minutes each month and join me? Just grab your phone or camera, point and shoot and upload your picture to my FB page using the hashtag #snapyourgarden.