If Christmas was part of your childhood and your memories of it are generally positive, you’ll probably look to replicate what you can of Christmas past when you’re all grown up. For me, a favourite memory is lying down and looking up through the boughs of my parents’ Christmas tree, with red and green lights casting a glow on the ornaments, and breathing in the pine scent. I’m not sure if I did this before or after seeing Pluto’s Christmas Tree, a 1952 Disney short (you can watch it in full here — thanks, YouTube), where Mickey Mouse and his dog are thwarted in trimming their tree by the chipmunks inside it. Watching Chip and Dale leap about, loosening lights and stealing ornaments, I was sure nothing could be better than living inside a Christmas tree, and I always imagined myself as one of them when I peeked through the branches every year.

So it’s extra strange that, this year, I’ve bought my family’s first ever fake Christmas tree.  I’m stunned at how happy I am with it. There is no scent of pine. Its boughs are too thickly woven to see up through. It’s unnervingly symmetrical. But even with all its conical artificiality, I dig this tree. So many things about it save me time and hassle, this year and in future Christmasses, and so it hits the bulls’ eye for me.

It has great clearance at the bottom for presents; our old real trees have been so crowded at the bottom that presents spilled far into the room. Its shape may be too perfect, but it reaches to the ceiling while keeping to its corner, and I don’t miss the real trees that thrust their fat rumps into the room, begging to have needles knocked off. The kids love the tree’s tall twinklyness, and with the “night” setting on my Fuji, I can capture endless Disneyesque, inside-the-tree shots. Most important, I’ve avoided hacking down a young tree to create a decoration that is only briefly perfect. This tree will last, and I am already appreciating how fresh and festive it still looks after 10 days. With all its Christmasy aroma, the real tree and its slow death inside the house is a downer, and the decline is visible so quickly, even with TLC. And did I mention we’re not running the vacuum cleaner every day to erase signs of decay? Plus, no more two-hour tree-hunting trips in December, the month when I can least spare the time.

Instead maybe I’ll get to spend a few hours in December as many other gardeners do, laying plans for the next season. My mother phoned from Boston yesterday to say she had sent us some money for Christmas, so I found myself in Dobbies this afternoon with a budget in mind and a list in hand. I now have the essential ingredients for The Eatin’ Project, as I’m calling my first proper attempt at growing vegetables in a 1m x 1.2m raised bed. I have been rubbish at growing vegetables but I will make it happen this year. If I teach my kids nothing else about the garden, it should be basic skills about how to turn seeds into food, just in case the climate goes to hell sooner than we think and commercial agriculture simply can’t support us all. If I invest five or 10 years making all my mistakes now, maybe I can help them get a better start.

Merry Christmas to all.

The proliferation of gardening and garden writing awards has got me wondering whether we gardeners are an especially needy bunch. The diversity of form in these awards is vast, from the well-meaning chain letter to the tongue-in-cheek high-school popularity contest to the bright lights, big city variety. (And if you haven’t quite had enough, the Garden Writers Association 2010 Media Awards is now accepting entries). They perform similar functions: pushing forward a few individuals whose writing or photography is generally recognised as excellent.

And it’s not just gardening media but gardeners themselves, of course, who long for the rosette of recognition for their plot, whether that’s being named “Garden of the Year” by a magazine, growing a prize-winning leek or being chosen for the Yellow Book. (In case you don’t know it, the best private English and Welsh gardens are published in an annual volume and open up to the public a few days each year, with proceeds going to charity.)

I’ve concluded that gardeners are not extraordinarily needy, but we are driven to participate in so many awards by two major factors. First, like all other adults who have moved beyond school years, we no longer have regular assessments by knowledgeable teachers who can check and comment on our work. Is our work good? Have our skills matured enough that we can solely trust our own judgement on that? Whose judgement can we trust? In the absence of anything better, the awards become the bar, and the judges’ decision is final.

Second, with a few exceptions, gardeners and garden writers are largely isolated from each other, and awards serve as a kind of community-building exercise. Online communities like Gardenersclick.com and especially Blotanical, where unofficial awards abound, have tapped into this hunger among gardeners to find and connect with other likeminded gardeners and garden bloggers. Thinkingardens.co.uk, an arena for energetic garden criticism and analysis, to me seems to be in the same vein.

It is really only in arenas like these that kindred souls can be found. A US gardener in Maine wrote recently of her joy to discover that a septic tank problem was so serious it would require vast and expensive replacement work rather than, as she first thought, less-expensive repairs which would have destroyed a recently laid path. She received dozens of messages of support, and who but fellow gardeners could really understand this gardener’s logic?

The “awards” circulating on communities like Blotanical are simply a way for gardeners to further connect with and show their appreciation for their distant comrades. To me it’s a shame that so many of these awards take the form of a chain letter, though (“I give you this award, please nominate ten others who should also get it”), as this gives them a certain viral nature that can make honorees unwilling to pass it on, and lead to award fatigue like that described by The Galloping Gardener.

My own garden is a modest patch but I have seriously considered trying to qualify for Scotland’s Garden Scheme (our Yellow Book equivalent). On the surface that looks like I’m wanting a stamp of approval on my work, but really it’s just the company of other gardeners I crave.

Online communities are fine, but to have fellow fanatics stand in my garden would be wonderful. I have yet to meet anyone but Gordon the gardener (he cuts our grass) who will happily chat with me for ages about this self-seeder or that rose bush, pruning techniques, the usefulness of underground irrigation and so on. In the same vein, I joyfully submitted Stopwatch Gardener and my photography to a variety of awards schemes, if not genuinely expecting to win, then at least happy to be among “my people.”

I’ve realised that it’s not awards I really want, it’s company. It is ironic that gardening and garden writing — for me two quite solitary acts — aren’t fully satisfying unless I can share them with someone else who understands. And that means you, if you’re reading this. If those Rosa moyesii geranium seeds I planted last week eventually germinate, you’ll probably understand better than anyone who’s actually near me how much that means.

Thank you for reading.

Because I’ve spent most of my journalism career writing about technology before Stopwatch Gardener, I’ve been fascinated to see how garden writers and publishers are using tech tools to support their work. If you’re a garden writer who’s already pretty wired, you may already know these tools listed below. I’d recommend them to anybody, especially writers who need to save time and be more productive.

• John’s Background Switcher — JBS is more about inspiration than productivity, but it’s the best way I’ve found to enjoy my thousands of garden photographs. If your pictures are trapped on a computer, John’s Background Switcher lets you dip into them, bit by bit, by using your picture collection to periodically refresh the wallpaper image on your PC desktop. You set the time interval and tell JBS where to look for your pictures; I’ve set mine to refresh every ten minutes with images from my Flickr “garden” folder. And because each new desktop image shows the date, it’s continuously jogging my sense of what blooms when… a great way to improve gardening knowledge by osmosis. Best of all, it’s free software.
• Dragon NaturallySpeaking — This is voice-recognition. Very Star Trek. Right now I’m speaking this into my headset and every word is transcribed on the screen, with about 98% accuracy. Whether you write lots of little e-mails or churn out thousands of words a week, this will save you time. I began using voice-recognition a few years ago when I developed repetitive strain injury from typing, and at the time Dragon NaturallySpeaking was given to me as a journalist review copy. I never did the write-up because I suspected, rightly, that it was always capable of better performance than my struggling old PC could deliver. On my new PC DNS flies along; don’t attempt it unless you have plenty of memory and a microphone-equipped headset that plugs into a USB port. Headsets that plug into your standard microphone and headphone ports are too slow for high-quality voice-recognition. Dragon sells at retail for about £150.
• Google Reader — keep an eye on your favourite garden journalists, blogs and publications by subscribing to their website’s RSS feeds. RSS feeds are just the guts of the stories — plain-looking text and basic images — which are sucked out of the fancy-looking websites for you to read altogether as a simple list of headlines and stories in an RSS reader, like Google Reader. Check your favourite websites to see if they have an RSS feed; or, inside Google Reader, search for feeds by a keyword like “gardening.” A great timesaver, especially for editors who need to keep an eye on everything. The software is free from Google and works with other useful software tools like Feedly for Firefox (Firefox is an excellent free web browser alternative to Internet Explorer).
• Twitter — another free service which is being exploited so well by many gardening journalists and publications, not least The Telegraph, The Guardian, Garden Answers, and in the US magazines like Fine Gardening. Most publications use Twitter to tease and put links to their content on the web. But more exciting is the “crowdsourcing” of ideas that publications like Fine Gardening are doing on Twitter. They regularly survey the Twitter population to get ideas and recommendations about plants and things to do in the garden, to solicit competition entries, and more. FG is well wired: its website’s Pronunciation Guide for Plants, with “hear-it-out-loud” Latin plant names, is perfectly geared towards its US market, where common names rather than Latin names prevail.

How can gardening media in the UK and elsewhere make best use of technology and the web? It’s a question that the blog Landscape Juice, among others, has been asking. As print readerships continue to wilt, the thinking caps will need to go on.

I finished applications to two gardening photography competitions and have one more to go. I don’t know if I’ll do the GPOTY.org competition this year — the standard is very and there’s also an entry fee, which is a bit of a speed bump. I’ve just barely been able to make sense of my Graeme Cookson Photoshop notes from the Andrea Jones Spring Garden photography workshop to help me prepare some of the images. But I did manage basic fixes and brought up the colours in this cosmos pic — taken at RHS Harlow Carr in July.