It’s a quick and easy task to choose gifts for gardening friends when you are thoroughly familiar with their personalities and special interests. Men tend to love gadgets. Keen cooks like herbs and garden-themed cookbooks. Every gardener’s life is made easier and more enjoyable with comfortable tools that work smoothly. Year-round gardeners appreciate gear that keeps them warm and dry. Here are a few ideas for gifts that you can find at gardeners gift stores, garden centres and nurseries, bookstores and florists.
Ready-to-grow. Seeds are gifts of promise. They deliver the delights of anticipation. Look for seed collections on special themes such as herbs, salad greens or edible flowers. Complete growing kits include containers, seeds and growing medium.
For fresh, vital winter greens indoors, there are many kinds of seeds for sprouting and various styles of sprouting containers. For a fun, seedy gift, place seed packets, attractive label markers and a permanent ink marker pen in an old coffee mug or teapot.
Amaryllis bulbs and paperwhites are popular as gifts. Paperwhites are especially fast to grow and produce blooms. Or, buy these bulbs already potted and blooming.
Tools. Essential to garden maintenance are good-quality secateurs (hand pruners). My Felco pruners never seem to wear out. Felco has many models, for different hand sizes as well as pruners for left-handed gardeners. Loppers are a great help in getting at hard-to-reach places on trees and hedges. To keep the blades of cutting tools finely honed, consider the gift of a tool sharpener.
A comfortable and efficient hand cultivator is another must-have. Claw cultivators are good for lightly scuffling and aerating the soil around plants and between rows. Triangular diggers are versatile. They can be used for weeding, cultivating and planting. Narrow-bladed weeding tools like the B.C.-made Bandit are popular for getting into tight places.
A trowel is another essential. As with all hand tools, test the handles well for comfort. Trowels with serrated edges help to cut through difficult soils. Some have blades with handy depth markings.
Gear and gadgets. A friend who works year-round as a gardener loves her Bogs Boots. They keep her feet warm, dry and comfortable. Gloves for gardening come in a wondrous array of styles, materials, colours and patterns. Consider also a kneeling pad or a kneeler/bench, a tool apron or belt, an attractive watering can, and row or plant markers for labelling.
For those fascinated with gadgets, there are thermometers, rain gauges, moisture and pH meters. Soil thermometers are useful for judging when to set out heat-loving transplants such as tomatoes and melons.
Children. To draw children into the gardening game and help sustain their interest, consider a set of colourful child-size tools and brightly decorated gloves, sprouting seeds and sprouter, and seeds for flowers such as nasturtium and sunflowers and for favourite vegetables. Provide large labels for the child to draw on with coloured markers. Runner-bean seeds could be given with plans for growing them to create a tepee-style children’s summer hideaway.
Art and whimsy. Statuary, large and small, can nicely enhance the beauty of a garden.
Figures and forms can often be found that complement a gardener’s personality: a laughing Buddha for the sometimes boisterous contemplative, a birdbath or a group of quail for the bird lover, garden fairies for the fanciful.
Solar lanterns come in interesting shapes and colours. They are a practical and beautiful gift.
Miniature gardening is becoming hugely popular. Creating miniature vignettes in pots, terrariums, or small areas of a garden is fun. There is no shortage of inspirational reading on the subject: Gardening in Miniature by Janit Calvo; Teeny Tiny Gardening by Emma Hardy; Terrarium Craft by Amy Bryant Aiello and Kate Bryant.
For the birds. Almost every gardener finds enchantment in the garden’s bird life. To draw and nurture that life, there are beautiful hummingbird feeders as well as regular feeders, whimsical bird houses, and bird food.
Plants and flowers. Christmas plants are favourite gifts, and you can rarely go wrong with a deep-red poinsettia, but for something different, look for some of the other colours in this traditional Christmas plant.
A group of small flowering and foliage plants arranged on a plate or plant tray can become an instant Christmas garden with a red ribbon or Christmas decorations nestled in among the plants.
And for a person you know has a favourite local garden store or nursery, a gift certificate from that source would be a perfect Christmas present.