Botany Buddy

Alright, I admit that I am a sap for cheesy music (as well as the good stuff) and I have a weakness for great song writers.  Writing a great song is so similar to designing a great garden that I just can’t help it. Today it’s Billy Joel.  I have been writing in app speak for about a week straight without blogging, and breaking out the Greatest Hits was a sure fire way to get me back to my native tongue.  Don’t get me wrong.  I love the challenge of trying to hone together information into perfectly worded phrases designed to interact with on another on a technical level.  Writing an interactive book is actually great because it reigns in my run on sentences and teaches me to speak without analogies and innuendos.   However, is it me trying to change myself to try and please you…or is it me?  I think as long as I continue to be myself that I will come through in the end.  That is the key to writing a great song.  Finding the best in all of us, learning to bring it out and bring us together with the most efficient use of words, patterns, rhythm, is at the heart of music, writing, gardening and all the arts.

One of the key things I have learned to do in all of this is not change me and to be myself.  I learned a long time ago as a designer that when I did my best work, I let myself come out and tried to blend it with the essence of my clients and the space we were working in.  The same is true with plants.  Plants do their best for us when we put them where they want to be, not where we can make them do what we want.  As gardeners, too often we ask this of our plants and our spaces only to change ourselves too in the end.  By butchering them and controlling them to the point that they are no longer who they want to be (people, places, or plants) they cease to be the things we love and become all to unfamiliar.

So while we sit and reflect this winter and lust over catalogs to find the perfect plants for the prefect spots, let’s remember that the perfect plant is the one that can be who it wants to be and bring out the essence of the space and ourselves in the process.   If we do this we will get the gardens we want because those spaces, our needs, and the needs of the plants that will live there will bring us the diversity we crave.  If we don’t we will just ruin all the things we love about each other and our love of gardening.

We’ve all been in that bad relationship, and as designers in our desire to create and be something different we can make the greatest mistake of all  “She’ll promise you more than the garden of Eden.  Then she’ll carelessly cut you and laugh while your bleeding but she’ll bring out the best and the worst you can be.  Blame it all on yourself cause she’s always a woman to me.” Sound like something we’ve all done to a shrub or two.  How often have we done this?   When will we learn that our plants, clients, spaces and selves are what and WHO they are.  Only when we learn to respect that and learn that we have to live together will we achieve that love we long for one another.    If we don’t we will just ruin all the things we love about each other and love of gardening.  So when we think of ourselves as gardeners let’s think of ourselves as cheesy songwriters.

“So don’t go changing to try and please me.  You never let me down before…Don’t imagine your too familiar and I don’t see you anymore…I would not leave you in times of trouble.  We never could have come this far…I took the good times.  I’ll take the bad times.  I’ll take you just the way you are.”

The other day is doing my morning Twitter rounds, making sure that the world hadn’t imploded between 2:00 and 8:00 AM, when I came across a tweet about Botany Buddy from someone I didn’t know.  Now, my personal tweetographic region isn’t full of people that I often know on a personal (as in “in person”) level.  Those who tweet in my actual town are more prone to know me as a home-brewer than a horticulturist.  However, in my brief stint in the nest I have definitely come to “know” some of you in the most cyber of senses, and I think we have developed some true bonds.  But other than a few locals here in the mountains I think most of the getting to know that people do at this stage of my Twitter existence is still a matter of “Checking Me Out”.   This tweeter was definitely checking me out.  It went something like this…

“Watching a demo of @botanybuddy’s Tree and Shrub Finder. Not quite ready to get rid of my copies of Dirr and Hosie et al.”

Of course I replied…

“I still have mine and just bought the new one, but they don’t fit in my pocket and don’t have a search engine so I use both ”

For those who don’t know Dirr wrote the Bible of trees and shrubs and all subsequent versions.

Lets face it, I love books and always will, but I needed something I could use in different was.  My father was a college professor and every house we lived in had at least one room that was wallpapered from ceiling to floor with books on Philosophy, Political Science, and History.  As for my own, I replace the history with Gardening, Design, and Architecture.  I live for the day I can wallpaper with them and I love nothing more than to retreat into the stacks and dig out the most precious nugget of theory or fact, but almost immediately take what I find and somehow put it on my computer.  A little known fact is that after decades I have reunited with my high school debate partner to create Botany Buddy.  As I wrote our original database surrounded by stacks of books and references till all hours of the morning for months on end, I couldn’t help but hearken back to endless nights in the local college library writing our note cards and scouring the stacks, microfiche and card catalogs.

This process has also brought me back to much of the music of my past, as the headphones have been vital to my ability to focus and get my work done.  The scouring of data and compiling of collections has also coincided with the rediscovery of my music collection which is as vast and old as my collection of garden references.  Burning all of my old Cd’s and converting to iTunes from Napster made me even more aware of what we were about to do with all of these plants and the people in print and in my life who had brought me too them.  As I entered the plants and wrote the descriptions I relived my first reads and all of the people who I had planted them for.  I was also reliving the memories of  all the people and moments associated with the music I was listening to at the same time.  In the greatest of all coincidences, the final submittal of the final version of the app also coincided with the long awaited release of the remastered collection of The Beatles.

Almost as much as I looked forward to the release of the app, I was also looking forward to the re-release from The Beatles.  How great it was going to be to click one button and download every song they had ever written in chronological order and grouped by album.  Having bought them all at some point in vinyl, put them into or bought them on tape (even some on real to real), and eventually bought them one more time on CD to honor their survival to the digital age, the chance to buy them one more time was going to be an honor.  I was feeling the same about buying my own app.  To have all the things I love digitally recorded and stored where I could save and use them for eternity without every having to hunt them down because I had lost or worn them out again was going to be a dream come true.

I may sound a little obsessive compulsive and I am.  I even have every printed version of the Joy of Cooking and use them all.  It seemed almost spiritual as I was going to get the Beatles on MP3 at as the same time as would launch my own creation.  There was only one thing wrong…In the end (regardless of Amazon’s advertising) there were no MP3’s.  Once again I would have to replace the Cd’s that I had worn out, and that was alright, because they are worth it.  I also just bought the new version of Dirr.  There are no full color pictures, there is no search engine, and I can’t freely share the contents with my Buddies.  But I bought it again anyway even though it cost $70 to my $10 app.  Why, because through his writing he has become a part of me, still has much to offer, and as in industry we owe where we are and where we are going to those who have brought us to this point.

To go full circle, as this new venture continually makes me do with my life, we are not trying to replace the Michael Dirr’s of the world, we are trying to honor their work.  When I first heard the Beatles were being “remastered” I thought it was insulting to even use the term with their name.  However, the thought of having them available in my pocket, with a search engine, and where I could share them with my wife in daughter excited me to all end.  When I got married, A Little Help From My Friends and When I’m 64 were our wedding songs, it happens to be in my ears right now.  When I bought the newly released collection, I didn’t buy the remastered version, I bought the originals and converted them to MP3.   The Beatles, my friends, and the Michael Dirr’s of the world are what have gotten me to where I am today.  I would never try to replace them, but I would love to have them all on MP3.