This winter has seen us focussing on PURGING. For the first time since we moved here 22 years ago, we have been going through attic, cellar,closets, drawers, filing cabinets, ridding ourselves of all this messy excess.

The latest step in this project has me tackling 22 years of gardening mags, catalogues, 'to do' lists etc. I originally thought to throw away all the boxes without looking at them. But then I realized two important things.

While most of the catalogues were for nurseries and purchased plants that no longer exist, some of them(i.e. the glorious Klehm's peony catalogues and the Heronswood encyclopedias) contain records of plants that we would not be able to 'see' or read about elsewhere. I also realized

that there were valuable lessons in some of the mags, lessons that I had forgotten or never learned, but lessons that I needed to learn in my current gardeining life. Long ago, in the '90's, Horticulture mag. had some of the world's best gardeners, garden writers and garden historians- writing for them( whereas Fine Gardening didn't become an excellent magazine til fairly recently.)

So,with fav music playing and my stacks beside me,I have

quickly scanned the Tables of Contents and then removed key articles. The ravaged mags have then gone on to recycling at the town dump. I would hazard a guess at 5% as the amount of material i have kept.Whew!! One unexpected payoff is that this process has resparked my gardening interest during my usual 'Winter of Our gardening Discontent'.

best,

mindy