Garden memories in hard cover

Stop! Keep your hand away from the delete button and your match away from that old box of photos.

Those digital garden photographs do not need to be relegated to obscure folders and files where nobody sees them but a few friends who feel comfortable rifling through your computer. And those hundreds of bright prints do not need to remain buried at the bottom of the bookshelf or pushed, forgotten, behind boxes of holiday decorations. Put them to use. Make gifts. Share them with friends.

Of course, you can e-mail photos to everyone on your contact list, mail hard copies to all your relatives and show both to every garden friend who comes by. But I am thinking of something more creative, more substantial, more enduring. Photo albums are nice, but without you as narrator there is not story to hold the images together.

What about putting together a garden journal? Start with an acid-free blank book, some acid-free paper, scissors, paste, a calligraphy pen, lots of photos and lots of imagination. Sort the photos into meaningful piles — by garden, season, event, project and so forth. Did grandpa spend half of his vacation helping you thin trees in your little patch of wood? Chronicle the project and the end result into a journal for his next birthday. Begin with a shot of the unimproved wood. Proceed to images of him and the family together, the axe or saw in his hand. Pen in amusing or nostalgic antidotes that he will remember. Move on to the wood, thinned and pruned. Then add some photos of the wood after he left. The junco nest in a tree crotch, a little patch of wood fern in a clearing, the sun glinting off the dew on a spider’s web strung between low branches. Keep the narrative moving and include plenty of family-enjoying-the-wood shots. Can you think of a superior gift for an elderly man who spends a lot of time alone with his memories?

If you are not particularly crafty, or all of your photographs are in the computer, use the computer to make the journal. There may be other resources to do the same thing, but here is one web site that Sally and Brooke have found. Go to blurb.com and creating a book is literally as easy as one, two, three.

Step 1: Download free book-making software.

Step 2; Add photos, art-work, and text. (Very much like we did for the journal.)

Step 3: Order the book. A 7x7 inch book of up to 40 pages, soft cover, full color, costs as little as $12.95. The same sized book with 440 pages and a hardcover (Grandpa would probably fall asleep.) can be purchased for $74.95.

A review of this user-friendly site inspires me to create more than a journal. Do you think the market can bear another illustrated garden book? (I would probably buy one.) There are formats here for books of 5x8 inches standard format, 8x10 inches, both standard or landscape format, and 11x13 inches large landscape format. They range in price form $4.95 for the smallest, thinnest soft back, to $169 for the largest and thickest hardback. What a great way to chronicle a garden success and preserve those garden photos for posterity.

Another thought is to use the photographs to make a calendar. In its simplest form you could paste large prints of your own favorite photos over the poor ones in a tatty calendar received for Christmas. This would only work, however, if you do not invite the donor of the calendar into your house for the rest of the year. A calendar blank would be better, and for the computer minded we have discovered another site for creating calendars, vistaprint.com. This is another user-friendly site with hundreds of formats from wallet sized to poster sized, in a range of prices starting at $3.49 for a desk calendar with a photo on every page. Whether by hand or by computer, remember to use your imagination. For December, as an example, why not paste little cut-outs of red geraniums and green bells of Ireland onto a full page image of a birch tree encrusted with glittering hoar frost? Or for an autumn month, bright orange calendulas on a back drop of butter gold hay stubble?

So stay your hand before destroying the photographic records of your garden bounty. Cut our gift tags. Fold into cards. Just do not throw out.

Hally Truelove is a Master Gardener and Plants Woman who lives and gardens in Wasilla with her two daughters, a handful of cats, a bunch of bunnies, some guinea pigs, a dog and a frog. Contact her at 376-0909.