Gifts for Gardeners




Personalized Dried-Flower Bouquets
Add a personal touch by choosing the flowers and container to suit the recipient. For the genteel tea lover, use floral foam to arrange pastel flowers in a small, decorative teapot. For someone with flamboyant taste, create a striking arrangement of richly colored flowers, seedpods and curly willow branches in a large copper, stone or pottery vase. For the wine connoisseur, artfully arrange several twigs sporting rose hips or other berries -- I especially like eucalpytus berries for their distinctive blue-grey color -- in a pewter wine goblet. For an unusual twist, drape trailing flowers and twigs over the side of a wall-mounted vase.

Dried Herbs and Teas
If you dry herbs from your garden, consider packaging up assortments or a blends to give as gifts. Create your own "signature" herb blends for your favorite dishes, combining homegrown herbs with purchased spices. Include suggestions or recipes for using the blends. Make your own tea bags and fill them with dried mint leaves, lemon balm (or lemon thyme or lemon verbena), rose hips, chamomile flowers or raspberry leaves. You can purchase the empty bags with one side open, fill them and then seal with an iron. To preserve their freshness, nestle the tea bags into an attractive container that keeps out light, such as a covered sugar bowl or a wide-mouthed, colored-glass jar topped with a cork.

Seed Packets
If you're a seed saver, why not package up seeds you've saved from your best bloomers. Enclose them in the empty tea bags sold for stuffing with tea leaves (which can be cut open later on) and place them in small cellophane bags. Decorate with stickers representing the flowers inside and handwritten labels noting the variety name and perhaps why you chose to save the seed, e.g.You can also put them in small envelopes which works as nicely.

Edible Concoctions

If you have favorite recipes for preserving foods from your garden, chances are someone else would appreciate them too. You could compile some into a booklet or onto recipe cards, and include a sample of one of the edible delight. I still have recipe cards written by my grandmother and I treasure them.


Gift Baskets
Keep your eyes open for interesting ceramic or clay pots and fill them with items that pamper: jars of aromatic rubbing salts for tired feet, herbal bath beads, scented soaps and lotions, luffa sponges, and nail brushes. Or buy an apron in a botanical fabric and fill the pockets with essentials: pruners, plant labels, gloves, a trowel and a gardening journal.

Finally, provided you know your friends' reading habits, you can't go wrong with a subscription to a gardening magazine or a gardening book. Personally, I don't think it's possible to own too many gardening books!


Well that is it for today,I will be back tomorrow.