Nobel Prize in Garden Blogging Nominations Now Being Accepted

My alphabetized list of suggested categories.

1. Chacun a Son Gout Award – for blogging about your personal taste in gardens that, until you explained, would have been likely to strike others as bizarre, or even disturbing. Also known as the “strawberries grown in tires painted white award.”

2. First Degree Plantslaughter Award – for a post about the most inadvertently cruel murder of nursery starts. Simple neglect doesn’t count – go for creativity.

3. Freestyle Pruning Award – for blogging pictures of topiary that might have been trimmed by a striking longshoreman with delirium tremens. No gum-drop shrubs EVER.

4. Gilding the Lily Award – for blogging about not leaving well enough alone in the garden. You know who you are.

5. I’m Just Saying Award – for a garden post that seemed to make sense at the time, but in retrospect manifests at best the blogger’s twisted sense of humor, and at worst his/her clinical insanity.

6. I’m Special and You’re Banal Award – for a post about the most pretentious groin-grabingly transcendent garden design ever. Extra points for smugness and passive aggression.

7. Moral of the Story Award – for a post that succeeds in refreshing a garden cliché, thereby teaching the rest of us lessons about wildlife survival, beauty school drop-outs, grave robbing, or other obscure topics whose connection to gardens and blogging would have otherwise seemed tenuous or contrived.

8. My Grass Is Greener Award – for blogging about executing a garden idea plagiarized from someone else. Extra points awarded for cloaking your envy with sophisticated disdain.

9. Not My Fault Award – for a garden-related blog post that incorporates a self-deprecating critique of the gardener’s failures, but without including self-pity or homicidal rage.

10. Pride Goeth Before a Fall Award – for a post about a garden ambitiously planted in Spring that turns out by Summer to be more than the gardener could possibly maintain.

11. Squint and It’s Lovely Award – for a post describing a garden that incorporates otherwise offensive elements which, at a proper distance, acquire a degree of sublime beauty.

12. Swing and A Miss Award – for blogging about a boldly attempted, but poorly executed garden vision.

13. That’s Not What I Meant Award – For blogging about the unintended consequences of a specific garden design idea, preferably positive, but consideration given to results that created a mutant strain of Japanese Beetles impervious to any pesticide including napalm.

14. What Were You Thinking Award – for blogging about the gardener’s worst implementation of what seemed like a good idea at the time, but which turned out to be as inviting as cupcakes topped with grease that congealed in the frying pan after Sunday breakfast.

15. Zone Maps Be Dammed Award – for blogging about successfully cultivating an unsustainable garden or plant that has no business trying to survive in your climate zone. (Note this is a high bar to pass because I’ve tried for >20 years to cultivate lilacs (syringa) in Zone 22, and my current attempt still has a few leaves on it’s stunted branches.)