I'm not as scientifically oriented as you are, erict, but I also am very willing to try out new things in my garden. No row of azaleas across the front, no rows of pansies or impatiens for me. But I also love tried and true stuff like lots of hostas for the shade, daylilies by the dozens, and ferns of just about any kind, clematis climbing on trellises. All this is actually moot right now because I am in the midst of weed pulling. Groan. All that cool weather kept me inside and wow, did those weeds think it was great!

My style? Shove it in the ground and hope it grows! In reality, I don't really have a "style". This year I went with loads of annuals as I just don't know if I should invest in long term plants, not knowing how long I will be here. I love daylilies and oriental lilies and just left a bunch of both at my place when I moved back in to the house to take care of dad.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I did bring some, just not all and I have already purchased new daylilies and orientals for here, just not what I would normally buy.

So, I am ordinary I guess, I have things that one would probably see on the cover of Home and Garden, but as long as I have color I am happy.

Perennials/annuals that bloom as long as possible, since our growing season can be about 10 1/2 months long if you stretch it out right. Plus, I must love cottage style. I like for my eyes to move in undulation across the yard and see things waving in the breeze. It takes tall fluffy flowers to wave. I love cool, soothing colors and all of this must drive my husband crazy since we walked past a display in Pigeon Forge with red begonias in exceptionally straight diagonals and he exclaimed, "Oh, can we have that?!". He loves warm, bright colors. All of which I find ironic since I am so straight laced on the outside and he is so, well, unkempt. Kinda opposite gardening styles of how we look.

I'm a plant collector. I go to plant sales & if something looks interesting, I put it in the wagon. This makes for a very eclectic garden as when I get home there is usually teh qustion of where in the heck is any one plant going to go. My problems are usually compounded by the fact that so much of what I've bought tends to get really big.

When I'm in a designing mood, I just say that i've go a Texas cottsage garden. That's as good an excue as any.

"Shove it in the ground and hope it grows!"

Amen, Sistah!

sylvia
another Texas cottage gardener

If it blooms and the hummingbirds and butterflies like it
then it's for me.
I left a beautiful garden when I moved back to the city
and I do miss it and I'll miss the hundreds of hummers that
flocked to the flowers and feeders every summer.

My yard is much smaller here but it's okay. I have a hummingbird that comes to the feeder and when I get the garden planned and planted there will be more.
In the meantime I'm busy remodeling this old house and I
have to say, it's beginning to grow on me.

As for what kind of gardener, I'll try new things but I still do love the old standby flowers, impatiens are still a favorite of mine for the shade, along with hosta and I
love azaleas.

I'm living with someone else's landscaping right now but it
looks okay til I can do better.

Janis, I like impatiens, too, just not in tidy rows. I just put in a couple of flats because we're having a party and I need color FAST!

Because I am not sure what I want to do now that I am back in our home, I choose to put in lots of Profusion Zinnias, in fact I put and entire flat in the bed closest to the street and just in the front of that bed for visual impact. Love those flowers and at least they will give me the color I want for now. Oh, impatients are here and there also, love those little flowers.

No real style. I started out a gazillion years ago with all the common houseplants,like peperomia, fittonia,dracaena which you mentioned along with schlefferas and others,then progressed outside and now for the past 25 years with almost 4 acres grow everything,except tropicals. I find them too static for my tastes. I like things "rumpled" looking,for want of a better word and all my gardens are full ofplants that sway in the wind. Even the roses,of which I have about 50,are big old floppy heirlooms. All that being said,I don't think there are many plants I don't find interesting in one way or the other. What I've learned is that the longer you garden,the more open you become to everything out there that comes from a seed and is green.

I garden hedonistically. If it grows, I prolly want it. Lots of it. Mounds of it. Drifts of it. I have a budget for everything but plant material. It's exempt. Out of all the men in the world, fate led me to another gardener with the same philosophy about the absolute necessity for plant material. I usually attend a plant sale at a near-by arborteum. I usually take a truck and am gone half a day. When I return, he is sitting in the swing by the drive with a shovel nearby.

He used to be a specimen collector too. One-twosies of everything. Problem with that is they get lost in the sea of other flora and the effect in the landscape is busy. So, he still collects, but not by the each anymore.

We have acreage too, and I don't even have a clue as to how many beds of flowers/trees/shrubs we are up to now. If there's a space to put something in, it gets filled. If there's no space left in an available bed, then it's time to dig a new one.

The clue to how bad I have this addiction is I do it for a living, and then this is how I spend my free time too. I think in every gardener's heart is the desire to recreate their own interpretation of the Garden of Eden. Nirvana, Elysian fields ;-)

I'm an experimental gardener. My only rule is "No orange flowers." (Well, except for all the orange ones.) My plants don't need to be rare specimens to be loved. They just need to be allowed to grow in a manner that makes my yard a compelling and engaging place to be. A perfect garden is one that is equally interesting to adults, children, wildlife and dogs, and should be visited often by all these groups.

I want something in bloom at all times. I am a sucker for bright (esp. pink!) flowers, vivid yellow-green foliage, interesting textures, and smells. I have no qualms about mixing herbs, veggies and flowers in the same beds. I like to grow extra-colorful veggies. I plant things way too close together and fail to thin my seedlings like I should.

I have a friend who no longer has the luxury of having a garden and allowed her to accompany me to the Farmer's Market to plant shop and then plant things on Saturday. In the process I learned it would probably be easier to share my husband with another woman (not an easy proposition either!) than to allow another person access to my garden. The intensity of my feelings startled me! As much as I love to share my plants, nurturing it is a highly intimate process. It was fascinating to discover how strong my feelings on this subject actually are! I garden well with my neighbor because we reign over adjacent Queendoms. Never again can I allow another Queen (or King) without a realm into my territory. (Oddly, when I left the house in the capable hands of my cleaning lady this morning, I felt only relief.)

My style is called Lazy. I'm striving for the title Laziest Gardener in the World. I have a shortcut for almost everything out there. Unfortunately, the leftover items take several dozen hours a week and could easily eat up more if I didn't have other things to do. I think I have to do some reflecting on how to bust out to the next plateau of laziness!

I favor foliage over flowers...enjoy the widely varying colors, texture and shapes. Garden only in containers now but I've 12 foot Eucalyptus neglecta and Phyllostachys nigra plus others for height, big leaves of Colocasia, Canna, scented herbs like Ruta graveolens and Rosemary, silvery Melianthus major and Centaurea Colchesters White.

I do like the bright clear red blossoms of Erythrina x bidwilli and Hibiscus coccineus, have purple foliaged Eucomis 'Sparkling Burgundy' which has strange colored blooms, and I like Alliums, but generally it's foliage alone that grabs me.

Inside tropicals mostly outdoors now are Cycads, several Polyscias, Stromanthe sanguinea, Curculigo capitulatas, Alocasias to Xanthosoma.

I'll stop now...you don't realy want the other 200 or so plants in pots named...lol Bog plants and pseudo-Bonsai trees and nonedible Asparagus and dwarf forms of Equisetum and Carex, etc. josh

I guess I am an evolving gardener.
When I think of how differently I garden now than I did say 50 years ago (well almost!) I am startled! I used every chemical to make it better, I sprayed I dusted and I planted bushels and bushels of annuals.
Over the years I evolved at one time to a cottage gardener with piles and drifts of waist high "stuff"...the word was if I didn't get all arranged by June 1, I wouldn't be able to get into the bed....I find those pictures of those gardens hard to believe now....so much work! So much chaos!! LOL!
My gardens now are more about easy....I lost my husband so I do almost all of it myself.....but I now have a lot more garden area than I did when he was alive...
I guess I think more about color and combinations than most people do, I walk around the garden for days with a pot in my hand trying to visualize.....
I guess I am a casual gardener, with a serious scientific bent...
Linda C

I'm a bargain gardener! My favorite words are 'Clearance Sale'! Better yet, free anything from the local yardwaste site will find a home in my garden! While mending from a car accident, I took a Master Gardener class. That class changed my life! I used to have a black thumb, and bought big plants...because it took them longer to die. Now, I smoosh a little bit of everything into my teeny, tiny garden! My dog and I can be found in the backyard all summer. My job is weeding, hers is laying on the shade to hold it down. In the winter, my dining room is a jungle of stuff waiting to be enjoyed next summer. Deborah

Pidge, this year I only bought one flat of impatiens and
I don't like them lined up either.
When I need lots of color fast or need to fill up planters,
I go for the baskets and just re-pot.

If you want to see plants in a row, drive by my house
and see what the previous owners did.
It will have to stay that way for awhile because I've
spent the landscape money already.

I've found a gardening soultwin.jazmynsmom. Everything she said is right on except my color is yellow. In one of my beds i have cone flowers, iris, daylilies,spring flowers, violets,shasta daisys,a rose bush,surprise lilies,liatris,lunarias, garlic and 2 dandilions.

Have really enjoyed reading all the gardening types.

I am a 'stick it' gardener.

Where ever there's an empty hole, that's where I stick it.

Count me as another one who can ditto Jazmynsmom. I never thought about the issue of another gardener working in my garden, but I guess I can sum up my reaction in two words: Get out!! Well, maybe I'd add "please."

Over the years I've lost interest in doing much with annuals, except I still plant a small bed of various kinds of sunflowers with zinnias in front. People seem to love to see them, and they provide a lot of closeup photo ops for me. Plus I planted a pot with lavender zinnias in the middle of one flower bed, and I'll have impatiens on the porch.

I told my cousin (a Master Gardener) the other day that I failed to inherit the garden design gene, which she has in spades. She said, "Yes, but you plant so many things that I've never had in my gardens." I don't know what she was referring to specifically, but I used to grow most of my flowers (and all our vegetables) from seed, and got fairly adventurous with it.

These days, looking at my flower gardens, it seems clear that I prefer tall plants to short ones. It's also clear that I've planted some in the wrong spot for their size. I love the "spires"Âlike lupines, foxglove, and delphiniium. I'm a latecomer to iris, but find them enchanting. I'm still in the process of becoming a decent rose gardener, but I'm pleased with the amount I've learned, particularly on these forums.

Random . . . eclectic . . . cottage . . . I'm all those things. I'm also a gardener with a cautious eye on the future. I'm 65, with fibromyalgia and a noticeable diminishing of energy and stamina every spring. I've watched the best flower gardener I know give up her pride and joy when she became too old to keep it up. Before that day comes for me, I want to garden to the max. Which explains why I bought so many plants this year.

Susan

Right now I'm a tired gardener. I've got the local MG's coming to see my daylilies after the monthly meeting on Thursday & I've been trying to get ready. No fun now that we're into the ninety-degree temperatures.

Except for pots, I don't use very many annuals any more either. Basically, I tuck them into the few blank spots I've got in-between the perennials. However, in a way, I'd like an old-fashioned cutting garden of annuals & just grow them from seed.

lol, Andie ~ >Right now I'm a tired gardener.When I first read OP, I thought a good response would be "Frustrated." After all, no matter how I am glorying in finally having real spring (read WET), rain every single weekend is making a sodden mess of my planting schedule.

And then a true response might be "Discouraged." An accident involving open windows in February which resulted several hundred frozen seedlings did qualify as discouraging. Also discouraging is the cumulative cost of buying replacements for both the frozen seedlings and for all the perennials which died from drought.

An equally true response would have been "OG," but then I remember that Uncle Sam has taken over and officially defined 'organic', which isn't quite the definition as I knew it. I guess I'll have to define myself as a "PFG", that is, one who engages in pesticide-free gardening.

At one time or another, I've been most of the descriptions already listed. Right now, even after 60 years of gardening, I guess my type is 'still learning'.

Almost a non-gardener lately - as far as the home garden goes.