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In celebration of the beauty around you

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Photo by Madoline Markham.

Lida Inge Hill’s Crestline backyard lives in her journal. Inside a black spiral book, she has created watercolors of her trees and shrubs, delineating what is native and what is alien. She started it as a personal project to share with friends, but many of them told her she should publish it. 

“What touched me the most was when they told me they could see the love in the paintings,” she said.

Copies of Journal of a Cottage Garden are available beginning this month. The published version, spiral bound and printed on recycled textured paper, feels like a journal as well. Hill cleaned up spelling errors to publish it, but the text is all her original handwriting. 

Hill started with a map of each plant in her yard and would devote hours to sitting in a lightweight green yard chair to capture what she saw. Next to the paintings, she used a black pen to list a fact or two she had researched about each and to describe her memories associated with it.  

There’s a bald cypress former homeowner Henry Hughes started from seed that now you can’t see the top of. (Hughes, the director of education at Birmingham Botanical Gardens, also wrote a preface for the book.) An aucuba came from her first house, and cuttings from it were used for her daughter’s wedding day. The fig tree is one she and her mother bought together in Montgomery. 

Douglas Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home, took note of what Hill conveys in the book: “The heartfelt relationship Lida has with plants in her yard can be felt in every drawing. She plants seeds of awareness that our garden choices have consequences at home and beyond.”

Hill said the project has increased her passion for native plants. As a result, she is gradually replacing all alien varieties in her yard, which she sees as invasive. 

“Filling gardens with alien plants upsets the balance of nature,” she said. “We don’t realize how birds are taking seeds into the forest. It’s not just invading our yards, it’s invading our forests.”

Hill hopes the book helps readers be more aware of what they look at around them as they enjoy the watercolor and recollect their own memories.

“It’s so easy to get caught up in doing programmed things, and I think this is my way of saying, ‘Let’s slow down and realize life is about interacting with other people but also with the natural world of plants, insects and spiders,” she said.  

Hill is also planning to hold talks on native plants (see event box below) as well as garden journaling workshops at the botanical gardens on Jan. 9 and another one at Petals from the Past in early 2016. 

Journal of a Cottage Garden is available for $20 (with tax) at Little Hardware, Leaf N Petal at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens, Little Professor, Crestline Pharmacy, Birmingham Museum of Art and Aldridge Gardens. To contact Hill about speaking or the book, email dawntoduskpress@gmail.com.

Passion for Native Plants: A Journey and a Journal

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