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Mandevilla 'Red Riding Hood'.
Mandevilla 'Red Riding Hood'.

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Male pyrrhuloxia.
Hot and thirsty Pyrrhuloxia.

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Red Fairy Duster bloom.
Fairy Duster bloom.

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Down Memory Lane
T
ime flies when you're gardening.  It's been ten years since The Tucson Gardener first went on-line. Back then, September 1997, the website was called The Desert Gardener and a film camera (sounds almost archaic by today's standards) was used to take the pictures before they were converted to digital images and placed on a floppy.

Google was blossoming as a search engine, but it could get tricked by unscrupulous programmers trying to up the visits (hits) to their websites. If you did a search for the desert gardener you would have been amazed at all the sites that came up. Click on one of them and there was a very good chance you went to a pornography site and got trapped in a vicious loop of less than tasteful ads. (Yikes! I blush at the thought.) Certainly not what was intended for the desert gardener. Fortunately, Google, Yahoo and other search engines figured out a way to filter out the sites and make reader search inquires a bit more relevant.

Pieced together clipart from an early homepage  for The Desert Gardener.

A current homepage for The Tucson Gardener.

A more current The Tucson Gardener homepage.

The name for the site changed because the term desert gardener encompassed a lot more than intended. When the site received emails from the Mideast, South America and Canada from readers asking questions about gardening, it was decided to narrow down the intended audience. Hence the name change to The Tucson Gardener.

The 35 mm film camera was eventually retired for a digital camera and as technology improved cameras with higher resolution were used for the site. The frequency of articles also changed and not because there wasn't always something new to write about. Mainly, The Tucson Gardener would rather garden, admire the local wildlife, or take a nap in a hammock on a sunny afternoon, than sit at a computer. In my mind if you sit in front of a computer all day the task becomes work and when this website becomes work, then I'm pretty sure it'll cease to exist.

What remained constant the past ten years was the gardening - starting seeds, composting, planting, fertilizing, tilling, pruning, pest control and watering. Prices changed for such things as potting soil and certainly the price for mail order seeds  increased. It seemed the number of seeds in a package went down as the price for postage and the seeds went up.

The Tucson Gardener website, like a magazine redesign, changed in overall appearance two or three times over the years. New content was added, some stories or features removed. Web surfers popped in looking for specific garden information and sometimes it was found, sometimes not. Occasionally a reader would write to say thanks or point out an error here and there. Both were appreciated.

Quite frankly it's you, the reader, that keeps this site going. So thank you for the past ten years. It's been interesting.

-- The Tucson Gardener, 2008


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