Janet's
always been a writer and teacher. Steven's been into photography
for all of his adult life. When Steven was home raising the kids full
time and gardening became our shared part-time job to make ends
meet, those skills also came together very well. In winter we took
our gardening indoors as classes we developed, illustrated and
taught in Oakland Community College's Landscape Technology program.
We also developed and taught a gardening program for Schoolcraft
College and offered classes through a number of
Adult Education facilities and botanical gardens.
Internationally-published books
Some of those class materials evolved to become Janet's first
book, Designing
Your Gardens and Landscape (Storey Communications, 1991,
initially published as Easy Garden Design). It's available
in English and in Portuguese (!) in bookstores on this continent
and abroad.
We collaborated on our second, third and fourth books:
- Caring for
Perennials (Storey Communications, 1995),
- Successful Perennial Gardening (Meredith
Publishing/Ortho Books) and
- Eight Months of Color (Practical Gardening
Institute).
You can purchase Designing Your Gardens and Landscape
and Caring for Perennials from bookstores in your town,
vendors on-line, or from
us. The others are out of print but frequently available
through used booksellers.
Magazines
We have both written monthly for The Michigan
Gardener magazine since 1999. We saw that as a great way to
develop topics serially, as fiction writers sometimes develop a
book one chapter at a time in a magazine or newspaper column. We
have since compiled our first serials in three magazines,
Newspaper columns and article-correspondence compilations
We self-published five volumes of gardening how-to, based on
Janet's 1993 - 1998 correspondence while writing a weekly column
for The Detroit News. They were titled to reflect the column name,
Growing Concerns 1994, Growing Concerns 1995,
etc. She wrote that column for eight more years -- a 13 year run of
676 weeks plus thousands of individual letters to
readers. Then, we took our Q&A writing to the Internet, so
that we could illustrate as well as write. (Unfortunately,
traditional newspapers didn't allow for much space, or
illustrations and that eventually just became too limiting.)
We produced our self-published volumes in limited quantity for
the first five years and we have not re-issued them in print.
However, we have made them available, with a single index that
covers all five, on our CD Asking About
Asters. We also re-named them, using an alpha-sequence:
Asking About Asters, Bunches of Bushes,
Clipping a Crabapple, Dividing the Daisies, and
Evergreen Entries. With them on that CD are 50 additional
articles compiled as Outlook on Oaks.
Still remaining here in our files are the eight additional years
of weekly columns and correspondence. We thought to publish them
under "F" through "N" titles.... Now that we're up on our own
website we're going to post them all here!
What's Coming Up e-newsletters
While we were getting our resources mustered for this website,
we wrote our weekly column, What's Coming Up, as a
direct-email piece. We produced a second CD, Potting Up
Perennials, to compile and index 100 of those
publications.
"No repeat" policy remains in effect for more than 20
years
None of our written materials repeats any other. Our guiding
principle has been to write so that we will keep learning, and
that means writing on new topics, or expanding old topics. If you
think that's not possible, we understand, because we once thought
that we'd write that weekly column for five years and then move on.
That's why we compiled them as we went along for that first five
years, thinking that the topics would run out after about 250 weeks
and we'd end up with something akin to a "complete guide to
gardening." Instead we learned that it's very true -- the more you
learn, the more you know you don't know.
Other publications and contributions
You have probably seen our names elsewhere. Steven's photos have
appeared in a number of books, magazines and catalogs, sometimes
with credit, other times not. They hang in the homes and offices of
people
who purchased his prints. They glow and glide across many
computers in his DayDream screensaver for gardeners (available on
the CD Potting Up
Perennials.) He produced a stellar series of images for an
18 month show at the University of Michigan Matthaei Botanical
Gardens Conservatory, images that are occasionally
returned to display. He's illustrated articles in Fine Gardening
magazine, contributed images to Lois Hole's popular gardening book
series, as well as to the Taylor's Guides to..., and
others.
Janet's written for a number of magazines: Fine Gardening (and
provided a comprehensive lesson in dividing perennial for that
magazine's Propagation DVD), Reader's Digest, Better Homes
and Gardens, several websites/e-zines, Hour Detroit, Detroit Home,
and others. If we were asked and had the time and interest, we
said, "yes."
Still growing, but now doing it here!
For the past few years we've focused on our internet network and
a comprehensive archive here. After 20 years of writing we now have
a place where we, and you, too, can lay our hands quickly on what
we've already done. We intend to use it to step up to more
topics.