A Garden Journal Journey
A new year is upon us! As many of us set our New Year’s resolutions, starting a garden journal isn’t just a great way to stay organized – jotting down our ideas helps us remain grounded in our lives and in tune with our goals. A journal can become a living record of your garden, a catalog of inspiration, and so much more. To help get started, we’ve put together some tips on fostering this thoughtful new habit in 2025.
There are endless ways to journal, from structured garden planners to freeform notes. We hope these ideas help you explore your garden through journaling, but you should treat these suggestions as optional and focus mainly on the ideas that resonate with you most. All you really need to get started is a blank notebook.
Gather your thoughts
A journal is your space to pull the thoughts out of your head and into the world, but it can be a challenge to overcome the fear of the blank page. Start with a list: your garden goals for 2025!
Everyone’s goals will look different. Do you have a color palette in mind? Do you want to replace your lawn this year? Maybe you’re working on adding more native plants for a Backyard Habitat Certification or getting started on your own food forest. Goals can be small (like beautifying a small area of your yard) or ambitious (like redesigning your entire garden), but breaking the plan down into smaller tasks can help make any project more achievable.
Find Inspiration
Journalling is an excellent way to keep track of inspiration to guide your garden goals. Inspiration comes to us in many forms and looks different to everyone, but it’s always worth hanging onto the ideas and images that strike a chord in our hearts. Dedicating part of your journal to saving inspiration is one way to return to those sparks of intrigue when you need them most.
Seek Out Knowledge
This winter downtime is a great time to curl up with a stack of books or a good podcast, learning from gardening experts. Use your journal to take notes as you find inspiration – jot down quotes and pieces of advice that resonate with you, so you can easily return to that guiding wisdom.
Explore Public Gardens
The Portland Metro area hosts a number of amazing public gardens, carefully curated and ready to inspire as a gold standard of what’s possible in our region. The Portland Japanese Garden is a world-class work of art, using traditional Japanese horticultural techniques to create a unique landscape in the West Hills. The Lan Su Chinese Garden draws from classical Chinese garden stylings to create a peaceful urban oasis in the center of the city. For best-of-class demonstrations of specific plants, mark on your calendar to visit the International Rose Test Garden, the Crystal Springs Rhododendron Garden, and the Rogerson Clematis Garden when these plants are at their peak. For a botanical day-trip, the sprawling Oregon Garden in Silverton (just east of Salem) hosts 80 acres of elegant themed demonstration gardens, sustainable landscaping practices, and native ecosystems like wetlands and oak savannah.
Draw Inspiration from Nature
Nature is the greatest designer, so getting outside to observe the natural world can help stoke your imagination to mimic nature’s incredible work. Make a habit of slowing down to observe plant communities when you’re taking a walk through the park or exploring a hiking trail – if you have your garden journal on you, take a moment to write about what you see. Keep in mind that the most accessible nature spaces are shaped by a great degree of human management to remove invasive plants, replant natives, and restore biodiversity. In the same manner, you can steward your own plot of land as a flourishing ecosystem of its own.
Plan your garden
In the dead of winter, when little is growing and our time is better spent curled up inside, you can still get started on your 2025 garden plans inside of your journal.
Identify the Steps Towards Your Goals
Let the goals you set earlier help guide your plans – what do you need to achieve each goal? For example, if you want to invite more pollinators into your yard, you might research plants that attract bees or hummingbirds. Then, identify and list any steps you need to take (like soil amendments or reducing pesticide use) to help your plants succeed and your overall goal come into fruition.
Map Out Your Space
You don’t have to be an artist to visualize the possibilities in your garden. Sketching the layout of your garden space can allow you to explore different options before you start planting. Start with simple shapes – mark your house, pathways, and other permanent fixtures with rectangles, while existing landscape plants like trees and shrubs can be represented with circles. Then, you can note what spaces you need to fill and decide what to plant. There’s no need for these sketches to be perfect – thinking loosely allows you to make changes and iterations on your design until you’re happy with your plan.
Ask for Help
When the planning portion gets overwhelming, sometimes it helps to get an outside perspective. Our expert Garden Coaching sessions are designed to help gardeners like you imagine new ideas and reach their goals. With a 90-minute garden walk-through and a comprehensive follow-up plan tailored to your unique space, Garden Coaching can offer fresh insights to inspire growth in the garden.
Track your progress
As your garden grows, your journal can become a detailed record of your work alongside your plants. Dedicate pages to recording helpful information for your own reference. Here are some ideas to try keeping track of this year:
- What you plant and where it came from
- Weather conditions
- First/last frost dates
- Seed germination times
- Fertilizer applications
- Pest problems
- Bloom windows
- Crop rotation plans
- Locations of dormant plants
- Plants that attract pollinators
Record Your Successes and Failures
Gardening can be full of challenges, many of them unpredictable and outside of our control. Your journal is a space to reflect upon what goes right, what goes wrong, and what you can improve on in the future. Don’t just focus on the negative – take the time to revel in your successes and harness your own inspiration! Next year, all of this information will help inform your future garden goals.
Be present in your space
Few activities are more grounding than gardening – the process of getting your hands in the soil and collaborating with nature. To garden is to remain deeply in touch with the earth, the seasons, and the other living beings we share our world with. Still, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the hustle of everyday gardening tasks without taking the time to slow down and enjoy the experience.
Your journal is a space to reflect upon your gardening journey. How does gardening make you feel? What do you want to spend less (or more) time on next year? What keeps you going?
---
If you’re taking on a garden journaling project this year, keep in touch and share your progress on social media @CornellFarms on Facebook and @CornellFarm on Instagram.
