Jan Riggenbach is the author of Midwest Gardener’s Handbook and a longtime garden columnist and feature writer for Midwest Living magazine. Her recent release, Your Midwest Garden is a guide to the flowers, shrubs, vegetables, fruits, and other plants that thrive and make beautiful Midwest gardens. Below she tells us her “Gardner Story.”
For years I’ve
heard from readers who have a shoebox full of my garden columns clipped from
the newspaper. Over and over, I heard the same complaint: “I can never find the
column I’m looking for when I need it.”
I promised
I would gather the columns into a book. This year, in Your Garden: An Owner’s
Manual, it finally happened. I laughingly tell readers that the index is the
most important part of the book because now they can find what they’re looking
for.
I’ve read
and reviewed a lot of garden books over the years, but the ones I keep are the
reference books that I turn to again and again. To help make my own book a
useful reference, I added plant lists so you could see at a glance, for
example, which perennials to plant for fall bloom or what annuals will thrive
in the shade. In the appendix, I added a month-by-month garden chore list, fine-tuned
for Midwest gardens.
My
audiences gasp when I tell them it took me almost 40 years to write this book,
but it’s true. In that time, I’ve written nearly 2,000 columns from which this
book was distilled.
Continue reading “From the “garden” of Jan Riggenbach”
