Gifts for the green thumbs in your family
Here’s something you may not know about gardeners: they may be the easiest people on your list to find gifts for. You don’t even need to leave home to acquire (notice that I avoid using the word “buy?”) an appropriate and exciting gift. Secondly, gardeners love nature, which is all around us. All you need is some imagination to come up with wonderful, one-of-a-kind gifts. Once again, I am here to help: 1. Hands. Gardening is a hand-craft. Few of us think of it this way, but it is. A pair of gloves (good gloves, with re-enforced fingertips and a flexible, breathable knuckle), hand pruners (a pair that will last until the gardener can’t garden any more), hand tools like a stainless steel trowel, cultivator or (my favourite) a largevolume hand scoop or a handbook that identifies local bugs are all great gift ideas. 2. Save my back! There are alternatives to always having to bend. Pulling a weed? Pruning a rose? Here are some devices that I have found useful:
Speedy weeder. A long-handled device for pulling weeds that is easy and immensely effective at the job. Each time you “pop” a weed, you aerate the soil around the roots of grass plants. Double whammy!
Long-handled digging tools. I wear out my long-handled garden tools before I even get my short-handled tools dirty. Why? ’Cause they save me from stooping and bending. Look for the stainless steel versions of long-handled tools when giving to someone really special.
Long-handled loppers. Look for quality tools for cutting thick wood from trees and shrubs. Some provide extended handles that help you reach up to four feet further. Some are “ratcheting,” which means that, with a couple or three pulls on the handle you can cut through thick, green wood one increment at a time. Easy. 3. Learn. Gardeners love to learn. Recently I read a great book called The Founding Gardeners, by Andrea Wulf — how gardening helped to “found” the United States. It is a lesson on history, botany, horticulture and perhaps most useful of all it helps us understand the critically important role of gardening in our recent past and therefore who we are (or, more accurately, who Americans are).
There are lots of great Canadian books out there too: look for Steven Biggs’ book on figs and his latest for kids that he co-wrote with his daughter Emma, called Grow Gardeners. Kid-tested Gardening with Children: a 4 Step Approach. 4. Experience. Gardeners love to experience plants and nature outside of their own familiar environment. It is one of the best ways to learn — and to meet like-minded people. Consider a membership in a local (or not-so-local) botanical garden or conservation society. Here in Toronto, we have the Toronto Botanical Garden, the Toronto Music Garden and in Burlington/ Hamilton the Royal Botanical Gardens. All of them can be accessed online for membership. If you think about it — or Google it — you could come up with some public gardens and green spaces that need your support, and are worthy of it, within driving distance of where you live.
Consider buying them a tree — or buy a few — to help populate the Highway of Heroes through the Living Tribute campaign. Go online to hohtribute.ca and donate $25 for a seedling, $170 for a six- to eightfoot tree or $500 for a grand caliper-sized tree.
The goal is to plant one tree for each of Canada’s men and women who have fallen in war since Confederation. 5. What are friends for? Gardeners need help (no, not that kind of help). Cultivating, planting, nurturing, growing and harvesting is hard work and it takes time. How about lending a helping hand? Make a gift of yourself by offering a few hours of weeding, bringing empty pots up from the basement or garage this spring and filling them with container mix, pruning an old apple tree . . . or whatever. You get the idea. Give a gift of yourself. (Gee, I hope my kids read this.) When you come over to lend a hand bring a thermos of coffee, or a six pack; I assume that you know the preferences of your friends. That’s just a start, really — photographs, bird seed and feeders, hand lotion and soap, a hat, gardening knee pads (which are different from the popular heavy-duty knee pads people use for laying carpet) and gardening magazines . . . these, and more, all fit the bill.
Merry Christmas! Mark Cullen is an expert gardener, author, broadcaster and garden editor of Reno & Décor magazine. Get his free monthly newsletter at markcullen.com. Watch him on CTV Canada AM every Wednesday at 8:45 a.m. Email him at groundskeeper@markcullen.com. Follow him on Twitter @MarkCullen4 and Facebook.