(Photo inspired by Luke of Callus and Chlorophyll, below!)

Daffodil Planter, one of the funniest new writers on the garden blogging scene, tagged me to write a list of seven things about myself. Not wanting to hog the spotlight, I instead decided to shine the light on seven of the gardening articles I have read and re-read over the past year.

Margaret Roach of A Way To Garden tickled me with her reader-contributed list of Garden No-No’s – scroll down and read the comments for more hilarity. When I’m having one of those days where everyone seems to want red and pink petunias, together, to frame their red lava rock and garden gnome display, I go read this list and feel better.

Alexa over at Invisible Bees wrote a charming post about Letting Go of Perfectionism in the garden. She’s inspired by one of my favorite books on writing, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, and this article helps me take back that pure joy and pleasure in gardening and designing. My favorite bit is this: “the plants are perfections in and of themselves”. Yes!!

Town Mouse and Country Mouse thrilled me to my socks with their Myth Buster about how California Natives Don’t Need Water (which, if you don’t yet know, is wrong wrong wrong!!). Natives can be wonderful low-maintenance choices for the garden, but they still need a loving start and many will need supplemental water all their lives to do well in non-natural garden conditions.

Fern over at Life on the Balcony has a number of articles I refer to often, but my favorite is this list of gothy Black Plants for Container Gardens. Black is the new, well, black, and I don’t know about you all, but I’m so inspired by Amy Stewart’s Wicked Plants garden that I want a goth garden of my own.

Gayla at You Grow Girl writes beautifully about the Joy in Hard Work. If you love to garden and find yourself going outside to pull just a few more weeds before dinner, then her thoughts on this will resonate with you as they did with me.

And finally, Luke of Callus and Chlorophyll cracks me up with his mad ravings about his experiences as a garden professional. Read about the plight of poor ‘Lawrence Flatman’, relegated to a life in the shade, and his horror when he realized that his own childish joy in flamethrowers and other such manly gear has disappeared with overuse of his professional weed torch. My favorite part:

The next time you reach for a tool, look for its inner badassness. Fend off an alien-vampire with nothing but your Felcos; tame a John Deere velociraptor and ride it around with an extendable pruning saw as your lance; come on people, those fancy Japanese pruning and weeding tools are just asking to be part of a ninja’s arsenal (you are a ninja, aren’t you!?).

Yeah, I’m inspired, Luke!! (see my photo above!)

As a bonus, let me tell you about three of my favorite articles by Daffodil Planter (it was tough choosing, too!).

That Rose Campion – She Seemed Like Such a Nice Girl! The title really says it all! I don’t believe I planted any of my four Rose Campions, but – perhaps I’ll let her stay, just till she’s done blooming…

Are You One of Those Difficult Garden Center Customers? See if you recognize yourself – I blushed to realize that perhaps it was not very thoughtful of me to go tree-shopping in a thunderstorm. Sorry, nursery friends!!

Daffodil also carries a lot of breaking political news on her blog. See here for the latest on the Sheep for the White House Lawn. LOVE. IT.

Go visit these great writers, and in the comments below, be sure and tell us about some of your favorite articles – either ones you have written yourself or favorites from another blog.

And if I featured your article here, consider yourself tagged as well! If you haven’t yet, and would like to participate, here are the rules:

• Link back to the person who gave you the award.
• Reveal seven things about yourself (or, changing it up here, a list of seven garden-related things).
• Choose seven other blogs to nominate, and post a link to them.
• Let each of your choices know that they have been tagged by posting a comment on their blog.
• Notify your tagger that the post is up.