Four Years of Rants and Reflections but No Eden Recreated...

...but then I didn't expect to do that on June 5, 2007 when started this blog. It was born in a conversation at The Writers' Union of Canada annual general meeting in Vancouver, where I found myself sitting next to Marc Côté of Cormorant Books. He had recently agreed to publish my novel The Violets of Usambara, and during a workshop on the internet and writers, we joked that maybe an African violet blog might be good promotion.

Some 1260 posts and nearly 80,000 visitors later, I'm not sure that it was. A parallel blog on how the book came to be may have done more. But this blog--whose title comes from another book, Recreating Eden: A Natural History of Botanical Gardens-- has become a link with relatively large circle of friends, both old and new. They check in regularly to see what I'm on about this time: that they com back frequently seems to me to be proof that the things I'm concerned about also concern others.

Thanks for stopping by. My friends and family also thank you because your interest relieves some of my insistence about talking about my obsessions! There are times when they just roll their eyes...