Saturday, December 18, 2010

Welcome To The New Blog

Greetings Everyone!

I know you thought I had disappeared for good, but I promise I haven't.  Late summer and fall were incredibly busy and I was on the road--almost continuously, it seemed--from the third week in July, when I went to Portland for the annual Perennial Plant Association Symposium,  until mid-November, when I had my last speaking engagement for 2010.  In fact, I had four week-long or longer trips in a twelve week period of time in addition to several overnight speaking engagements.  In the midst of all of that, I decided to overhaul the blog and the website.  The blog is finished, but the website has proven to be a challenge, as the program  I had used previously doesn't seem to like communicating with my new laptop.  It's slowly coming together and I hope to re-launch the website with an all new look sometime after the first of the year.  In the meantime, the old website remains (mostly) operational at http://www.troybmarden.com/ .

I am already booking well into 2011 for speaking engagements and have even booked a couple of dates for 2012.  If any of you are involved in plant societies, garden clubs or other groups and are in need of speakers, please feel free to contact me.  You can reach me at info@troybmarden.com .

As many of you know, I was in the process of launching some garden tours when the economic crisis happened and I decided to table that idea temporarily until things straightened out a bit.  Well, it seems things are slowly getting better and I am considering putting together some stateside tours for late 2011 and 2012 with the possibility of a trip to Scotland sometime in 2012, also.  The stateside tours would be to the Brandywine Valley, with tours of many of the public gardens, nurseries and some private estates in the Philadelphia area and possibly to the Portland, Oregon area, one of our country's gardening meccas and a plant shopper's dream, with more than 500 nurseries within a 75-mile radius of Portland.  If any of you are interested in taking some intensely garden and plant-oriented trips, give me a shout! info@troybmarden.com  The more interest I know is out there, the more likely it is we'll be able to get enough people together to make some of these tours work out.  Once we have itineraries worked out, I'll post those, as well, so you can see exactly what I'm thinking about doing and the places we might be visiting on various outings.

For those of you in the South, you'll be seeing a lot of me in the State-by-State gardening magazines (Tennessee Gardener, Georgia Gardener, etc. etc.) this coming year and I'm back in touch with my friends at Fine Gardening and hopefully will be doing some more work for them soon, which takes me out again to a national audience.  We had another incredible year on our television show, Volunteer Gardener  http://www.volunteergardener.org/ , and I have to say a personal "Thank You" to all of you across Tennessee and our "spill-over" areas in surrounding states for tuning in each and every week.  Our ratings continue to be some of the highest in the country for locally produced television and those ratings are part of what keeps us on the air.  For those of you outside of our viewing area, you can find a few segments on YouTube if you search "Volunteer Gardener".

I hope that all of you are having a wonderful holiday season and now that the blog is back up and running, it will be full speed ahead from here.  I promise!  I have 5 months worth of photos and "plant talk" to catch up on, so forgive me if I fill your In-boxes with more posts than usual over the coming weeks and months.  At the least, I'm back to my weekly postings.  I hope that 2011 sees many of your wishes and dreams coming true.  Happy Holidays!

Troy

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