On the QT | The Official Newsletter of GWA October-November 2016 | Page 16

MEMBER PROFILE

CAROL MICHEL

Blog spurs Pam Penick’s
writing career
Did you ever wonder how the Garden
Bloggers Fling, held
annually in a different
city, got started? Pam
Penick can tell you.
Back in the mid
2000s, a few people
were starting to blog
about gardening,
including several bloggers located in Austin, Texas. Pam, who lives
and gardens in Austin, was a regular reader of
those blogs and decided she would start one,
too. She launched her blog Digging in February
2006.
Because there were so many garden bloggers in Austin, Pam and several others soon
organized local gatherings so they could meet
each other in person. At the same time, garden
bloggers from across the country and throughout the world were also finding one another
through websites such as the now moth-balled
site Blotanical where bloggers could register
their sites and locations.
Reading all these blogs from around the
country and world, Pam came up with the
idea of inviting all garden bloggers to come to
Austin to meet in person. Blotanical helped get
the word out, as did the garden bloggers, and
the first fling was held in April 2008 in Austin. As
Pam noted, “There were 39 bloggers at the first
fling and nearly half were from outside of Austin, representing 12 other states. We thought
that was pretty good considering at the time,
most bloggers hid their full identity. We were
happy they trusted us not to be ax murderers.”
Pam led the committee overseeing Garden
Bloggers Fling from 2008 to summer 2016.
(Toronto blogger/garden writer Helen Battersby
took over as committee head in July 2016.)
Following Austin, the Fling was held in Chicago;
Buffalo, New York; , Seattle; Asheville, North Carolina; San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; Toronto,
and Minneapolis. They are currently making
plans for a 10th Fling in Northern Virginia/Washingon, D.C., in 2017 and a 10-year anniversary
Fling in Austin in 2018.
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“ I wanted to make use
of the legal services,
which were a great
benefit.”

For Pam, Digging helps her share photographs and stories of her garden in droughtchallenged Austin, along with the stories and
photos of the many gardens she has visited.
Through her blog, Pam has connected with
gardeners throughout the world. Regarding
garden blogs, Pam observed, “So many people
want to have a garden but just don’t know
what to do. I think that’s where garden blogs
can help. They offer more locally specific
information than most gardening books and
magazines, which may be written by people
from vastly different climates and growing
conditions.”
Pam knows her region well. She started
gardening in Austin in 1994. “We got a house
with just a law n and I started planting and really
got into it. Then I started taking design classes
and looking for other ways to learn. By 2006,
I felt confident enough to design gardens for
other people. I was also inspired by the Lady
Bird Johnson Wildflower Center to use native
plants. We had a lot of challenges with droughts

and so people were willing to
adopt native plants that would
survive the droughts.”
Pam used her first-hand
knowledge of going from a
lawn to a lawnless garden as
the basis for her first book,
Lawn Gone! Low-Maintenance, Sustainable, Attractive
Alternatives for Your Yard (Ten
Speed Press, February 2013).
Following the success of that
book, Pam wrote a second, The
Water-Saving Garden: How to
Grow a Gorgeous Garden with a
Lot Less Water (Ten Speed Press,
February 2016). She has also written for several
magazines, including Garden Design.
Pam joined GWA when she received a
contract for her first book in 2011. “I wanted
to make use of the legal services, which were
a great benefit.” Since then, she has attended
several conferences and has won multiple GWA
Media Awards, including Silver Awards in 2015
for blog writing and an e-zine article, and a
Gold Award in 2013 for best magazine writing.
What advice would Pam give to others
interested in garden writing? “I would encourage anyone interested in garden writing to get
started with a blog. It could lead to magazine
articles, books and other opportunities. But if
blogging isn’t fun for you, don’t do it. It’ll show.”
And one more piece of advice from Pam,
“Get out of your own garden, too, to have new
material to write about.”
Carol Michel calls herself a gardenangelist, eager to write,
speak and share about gardening wherever she goes. She
blogs at May Dreams Gardens.