BEGINNINGS

Before becoming a weekly garden columnist for the Waterloo Region Record in 2001, I had written and published two books of humorous garden stories. However, I began writing long before that. At the age of fourteen, I was given a writing opportunity as the official Press Secretary of my local cycling club (no one else wanted it). It was my job to write a short account of the weekly club run and submit it to the local paper, the Holmfirth Express. The only instruction I received was that it should be written in the third person – ugh. I never in any way or at any time looked on this as me being a writer. It felt more like a chore, scribbling down the account every Sunday evening. I feel sorry for the editor at the time as I’ve no idea how he managed to interpret my pigeon scratches. Nevertheless, he made something presentable out of it.

It wasn’t until around 1993 that I took up writing again when I was required to write and present speeches. It soon became clear that all the speeches I wrote, delivered without notes, turned into stories. I went on to tell these stories for a few years at Mary Eileen Mclear’s storytelling barn in Baden, Ontario. Besides weekly columns, over 1150, I also wrote about plants and gardens for magazines such as Canadian Gardening, Grand Magazine, Garden Making, and in the US, Farmers Almanac. Many of these can be seen on the sidebar under Garden Stories and Green Trips.

The stories I've compiled do not feature plants at all, and they've suffered little from editing. They reflect what I was thinking, reading, experiencing, or reminiscing on at the time. Many were meant to be for telling, rather than reading. Not in any chronological order, some are serious, some not, and some are plain silly. If you like a story (or not) please leave a comment.

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David M. Hobson