Punctuation and horticulture might not appear to be obvious bedfellows, but when ruminating on an identity for this blog and a fledgling gardening business, I plundered the title of Lynne Truss’s entertaining book, ‘Eats Shoots and Leaves’. Rather than skewering modern grammar, I aim to share some thoughts and observations on gardens, gardening and gardeners.

Pedantry and punctuation have led me to ‘Weeds Roots & Leaves’, though the inclusion or otherwise of  commas remains debatable. In the punchline of the joke which inspired Ms Truss’s book title, the inclusion of a comma changes the sense of the phrase entirely, as it would in mine, though to less comic effect.

My original working title, ‘The Pedantic Gardener’, scored poorly when suggested to friends, although I enjoyed creating the proposed copy: ‘If your flower beds are punctuated with weeds and your shrubs need editing, you need the Pedantic Gardener. I can help you compose an elegant garden…’ and so on in similarly pun-laden prose.

I rejected the draft tagline ‘Tall tales from a small garden’ on the grounds it was a little prosaic, in favour of ‘Small tales from a tall gardener’ so as to reflect the modest nature of the blog content and the height of the author.

In my next post I shall explain how I came to write this blog and my purpose in doing so.