John of the blog An Obsessive Neurotic Gardener
Meet our newest featured blogger, John Markowski, creator of the blog An Obsessive Neurotic Gardener. He’s a husband and father with a passion for gardening. His posts are entertaining, informative and beautiful!
What was the inspiration behind your blog and how long has it been around?
I’d love to tell you that there was an “A ha” moment that inspired me to start the blog but there really wasn’t. I created it casually one night while watching the show Lost. I was always fascinated by the writing on that show and wanted to give it a go myself. The early blog posts were very wordy and a bit out there for a “gardening” blog but I never stopped writing from that point forward. Eventually, I focused a lot more on photography and that is where I am today. That was a little over two years ago.
How did you get started gardening?
Right after my wife and I purchased our first home in 1997, I cleared out an entire bed of ugly cacti and replaced them with a bunch of hybrid tea roses. The obsession kicked in that day. I spent all of my free time from that point forward stealing the tags on plants at nurseries so I could bring them home and do further research. It was the ultimate escape from my day job and allowed me to still feel like a kid digging in the dirt.
You post a lot of beautiful flower photos on your blog. How do gardening and photography go hand in hand?
Photography has allowed me to fool my friends and family into believing my gardens are impeccable. Almost all of my blog posts are initially inspired by photographs as they ultimately tell the story. I snap hundreds of photos a day and then review them that night. I am fascinated by how plants develop from day to day and the photos reflect those often subtle changes. Photography has also taught me to look at plants from all different angles and that has allowed me to look at my gardens with much more depth and intrigue.
What is one quirky thing about yourself we can share with our readers?
I worked as a private investigator right out of college after graduating with a degree in criminal justice and psychology. My original goal was to be Jodie Foster in “Silence of the Lambs.”
What is one of your favorite or most popular blog posts and why?
I recently wrote a post on how gardening and baseball are so similar. It started out as more of a joke, but it really rang true the more I thought and wrote about it. I felt like I really captured the essence of two of my favorite past times. I’m pretty proud of that one.
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My gardening ambition started at a very young age. Growing up poor and living as squatters in the Philippines left us with no place to plant nor soil to toil. Although, my mother’s relentless lust of flowers gave birth to potted flowering bougainvilleas which she paraded on our windowsills. There were nights that I stole red roses from a wealthy neighbor’s garden for my flower obsession and feeling guilty afterwards. Nevertheless, I visualized a rose garden I could call my own one day as a very young girl. After the ups and downs and the in between events in the past 60 some years, time brought me to live in Japan then America. As I enter the remaining decades of my journey, I am proud to say I published my memoirs featuring the rose on the cover of my book. Lastly, I am happy to say that there is no need for me to steal someone’s roses today.
I will be planting a few lovely, colourful, hardy grasses and plants, in honour of the late landscape designer Wolfgang Oehme (I literally just found out he passed on Noel’s blog today, a real shame: a great and innovative landscaper).
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