Welcome to Julie Witmer Gardens on Substack!
A garden newsletter about making gardens, the generosity of plants, and observations of the natural world.
Hello friends!
Glad you could join me for a fresh page, a “new leaf,” about gardening. For eight years I wrote the internationally read Wife, Mother, Gardener blog and I have come to miss the slower pace and the longer articles from those days. It has been six years almost to the day since I last posted on WMG, and so many plants and piles of mulch have come and gone in that time. Six springs, summers and autumns. Six winters, alternately mild and brutal in weather. And most especially, six years of homeschooling three growing children - the same who had their little feet in the last fountain photo on WMG, but now are getting ready for high school and graduation:
During those six years, Instagram as @JulieWitmerGardens has been a good place for me to share and chronicle my garden making, while also taking a minimum of time to do it:
I am so very thankful for the people I’ve been blessed to meet via Instagram, and the many garden bloggers from 13 years ago who I still learn from, many now on IG. Now, I have found myself eager to get back to a longer form of writing and a more thorough garden chronicle.
Change over the years
A lot of change can happen in a garden in six years. Just take a look at the Cottage Garden at our current home, Havenwood:
In 2014, the Cottage Garden was only a grass lawn and a dream. But six years later, it was bursting with life. It is so good to look back, especially as the work continues, and recall how far we have come in our journey to build an immersive, British-style garden at Havenwood. Now that I have 20 years in as a gardener, I have also wondered what I would think if I went back to talk gardening with myself all of those years ago. What would I say?
What will you find on JWG Substack?
Tales and Reflections of my own Gardening journey
Garden Design ideas broken down so that you can apply them to your own place!
Botany & Ecology, and the many things that tie them together and to our lives
Garden Photography, because I can’t stop looking
Online opportunities for garden chats!
An important thing to note here…
is that I love to help people make their own gardens. I am completely incorrigible about it, because it just makes me so happy to see people learning to live with plants as a part of their lives. Plants have been so healing for me, so it’s a need for me to share it. One of my favorite things to do is to teaching adults and children how to grow plants and how to interact with them through garden design. You will hardly be able to stop me from sharing along those lines.
Another thing that fascinates me is the extreme generosity of plants! They grow in so many surprising ways, and are ready to be given as gifts in almost any season. They model for us how we could live our lives in generous humility.
As I read Henri Nouwen today, I came to the afterword at the end of his book, Here and Now, where he says:
“To you who have read some or all of these meditations I want to say: Do not stop here. Continue on your own. My words were only to encourage you to find your own words, and my thoughts were only to help you discover your own thoughts. What I have written in this book is an expression of my own personal spiritual journey, bound by my own personality, time, place and circumstances. Your spiritual journey is as unique as mine; it has its own unique beauty and unique boundaries.”
I feel this perfectly expresses my hope for any garden writing I do here: That you take it, and be able to continue with your own unique gardening and find your own beauty. Every gardener writes from their time and place, and yet, with the eyes to see, every story is helpful to us as a part of the puzzle of life. We live to give to each other in these times and places, in an attempt to live out the generosity of nature.
Thanks for joining me here on Substack!
I hope that you will say hello in the comments, and let me know *what you wish* I would share here in this more spacious format. I am looking forward to an open space made more beautiful by all of the people and plants in it!
Happy gardening,
Julie Witmer
I am delighted with this! As a newbie to Substack, to your writing, and one who has many pots on the fire, I am not sure how I will keep up, but I am excited to learn. Two years ago my husband and I purchased a house and two acres for a retreat space, and while the house is up and running, there is much to be done in the yard! I look forward to inspiration and wisdom - more than I get by lurking in the edges of IG world!
Here's a handshake - apparently we both have 400 subscribers! (They can't possibly be the same people. Can they?!)