I’ve not been writing entries on my site due to a sudden reflective silence after I spent time with AI overviews about my life and work online. Up until the last year or two, I’ve gauged my reception on what respected colleagues mirror back at me, their private written responses to things, how my plants look, and how I do my job. The experience of reading AI overviews about my life and work is not the same as reading a creative interview I willingly consented to and participated in. It feels unnatural, creepy AF, and like I’m being surveilled.
But now we have readymade summaries at the push of a button and we can’t stop this. There are additional options like, “Tell me about her work at Cistus Nursery”. Clicking this, it zooms into my life, summarizing magically a job description I never ACTUALLY had. It’s not even internet stalking anymore. It feels far worse and it scares me.
I’m not going to share what AI wrote for me, but it rocked me. As I read it, I felt in my mind’s eye a bit like I was being gagged and silenced as someTHING spoke for me. It’s still uncomfortable and I’ve needed a few weeks to sit with those feelings, returning to the process, never feeling very happy about it, seeing how I feel when I do the same search with friends’ information. It still felt very creepy.
If this is the new normal, what do I do? I want to disappear. I’m ashamed for participating in this, but I’m also happy that I’ve reached a lot of folks who’ve appreciated what I’ve had to contribute over the years. Without this participation, I wouldn’t be me, and I wouldn’t know a lot of the folks that I’ve met here.
I’ve had time in the greenhouses at Little Prince to think long and hard about this conundrum, about the 18 years I’ve spent online writing about life and plants, and the fact that any real content and information shared online by myself can become part of content created by others in a flash. It’s one of the reasons I’ve resisted how-to and technical posts for years and have stuck to more personal content. I don’t like paraphrasing or re-writing the hard work of others, and like others, I didn’t want to be plagiarized, or reposted without permission by others to gain traffic for their sites, but now we have THIS.
I don’t even have the words. I don’t want to be scraped and combed through. I ignored that this was even happening. To my mind, the only answer to dealing with this is to keep creating ORIGINAL content, to not sound REMOTELY like others, and better yet, to write and say whatever I want and not base it on what marketing people repeat over and over about what’s the best way for your site to be seen.
The best way to be heard it to be yourself—not to pretend to be what you think others want to see and hear. If you want to make an impact, begin with intention.
And trust me, this site gets plenty of traffic. (Or at least it did up until today lol.) With the US going through political and cultural upheaval, I know that my life can change quickly. I’m old and have seen a lot of change at this point. I take none of my freedoms for granted. I won’t stop writing online—even though part of me really thought about it for the last few weeks. (Instead I made my personal IG account private. Not ideal, but it does feel better.)
Change is hard and we’re dealing with some very serious stuff right now. How can gardens help?
We know that gardens—both public and private—are where we often retreat to as individuals or in groups to sometimes celebrate or mourn both family, community, or personal life events or to escape the daily grind. Gardens are spaces we create, and as such, they’re not immune from our messy lives and ideas. They’re reflections of us, but they’re created with the intention to entertain, or uplift and hold us, albeit only for a brief time.
This is part of the intentional design of these spaces, and the important impact they can have on all of us. There are BIG garden trends for both private and public spaces. Styles and trends in public garden design have swept across the nation as broadly accessible aesthetic salves to people from many places, with many needs, all of whom are choosing to spend time to view these spaces. Some folks though sadly see their own interest narrowed in some of these places, most likely after they experience emotional atrophy of some kind and draw the conclusion that they’ve stopped seeing themselves reflected in public. They don’t approve of the intention to include, they want to exclude, and there is a long history of gardens doing that as well.
Do I think design can help with social problems? I have a degree in art history. So OF COURSE I do. I think that all of us would be better served right now to add some intention/impact thinking into everything we do for the next few years. Control what we can, and build community to create healthy growth—just like a plant community.
Gardens are about self-expression, and our public spaces, well, I think those will be in flux a bit now. While this is the public online version of reality, what’s happening here can still change what’s happening out there, and my intention is still to bridge these spaces and to communicate. As me.
The processes of communication/writing and design both have shared steps. Those seeking to speak/write, or create a garden, need to begin with an intention, goals (solutions), and a framework. If all goes well, when the audience reaches the piece, the interaction with it will lead to the intended impact.
“Oh how clever! I see this issue differently now. I’ve never thought about this. I need to read up more.”
“What a beautiful design. This is seamless and what a fantastic combination of texture and/or color. I see what they were thinking here. This is my style too. I can take away ideas to use.”
I share this now because I have always aimed to communicate a bit more than garden and plant descriptions, and after my AI experience, I HAVE TO BELIEVE that it will be fun to mess with the ghost in the machine, the creepy emerging consciousness of the artificial that will sweep these words and keep speaking for me.
My intention with this blog will be to mess with the AI. Disrupt with my tiny voice. What kind of impact this will have is yet unseen. Time, readers, and maybe censorship will decide.
This post was originally supposed to be based on a writing prompt, but the AI summary experience inspired me to explore a much large field.
What is your relationship with (intention for) your garden and how long have you been tending to it?
Let me answer this now so I can experiment with how AI will eat this up like a hungry ghost. To recap…
Campiello Maurizio was not yet named when I moved into this home in 2004 with my ex husband. His name was Pietro B and he is a wine grower, wine industry consultant, wine writer, and former chef. My role in life at that time was as a recent college graduate who worked in arts management and taught ESL part-time. We were both nerdy intellectuals with shared interests in history, philosophy, cooking, and growing plants. While Pietro was more interested in viticulture, I was a gardener interested in ornamental horticulture, ecological design and plantings with native plants, as well as garden design history.
Campiello Maurizio was inspired first by our shared interests in both our Sicilian heritage, and for me, at least in my head, Islamic garden design. I was too ill to do much of anything, so only small areas were designed, while the rest of the land was planted “for science”.
The living willow structure in the back garden was planned, planted, and trained for years by Pietro and I.
Another key inspiration was our shared interest in Japanese culture and design as we’d both learned about it as kids living in Oregon and California. We visited nearly every Japanese garden on the West Coast as a couple, and while I will always credit the Portland Japanese Garden as the inspirational public garden of my childhood, Pietro had once worked under Chef Hiro Sone, so had his own interest and history with the culture.
Japanese plants and the work of Japanese gardeners and horticulturists have inspired me for decades, and continue to do so.
Another thing about our home and garden was that we spent a lot of quality time with my nieces, and their neighbor friend, so the garden was intended as a teaching space for them too when they were growing up. After that, I loved to care for the therapeutic foster kids in my little garden jungle.
But my unknown health problems worsened during our marriage, and once I was diagnosed with hereditary angioedema combined with other diagnoses, Pietro B bowed out as he’d fallen out of love, and we parted ways in 2011. At that point, whatever I’d intended was over.
Campiello Maurizio, the Garden of One-of-Each-ee began again at this point, but the intention for it had to change, and the name was still not given to it for a few more years.
In 2011 I’d already been gardening for over a decade, and I’d been growing and collecting seeds to sell on Etsy for a few years. This blog began in December of 2007 and I wasn’t hired to work at a nursery until 2016. During this pre-professional phase, I cannot express enough how much blogging, social media, traveling regionally, and socializing with so many others connected and grounded me to the industry that I’m very much now part of as a horticulturist.
Between marriages I was sure I’d have to sell the house so for a time, I just let it all go as I worked on myself, my health, and tried to think about how I could support myself alone, while remaining essentially physically unable to work. I didn’t want to feel the terror of being alone and unable to care for myself to ever happen again.
But then I got remarried, and it was clear I’d have to work, so I pushed and pushed myself very slowly uphill to where I am today. Some days I was carried by others, other days my physical therapists helped me to stand, still others, I spent those days recovering from spinal surgery, and I bitched and moaned—a lot. Friends have been there throughout the last few years. And I couldn’t be here without that support.
My intention now for Campiello Maurizio, the Garden of One-of-Each-ee, is to edit the heck out of it, to use funds I’m earning to both live as I’ve wanted to, and to better communicate projects I intend to finish. It is still my stage to perform upon, my sanctuary to cry in, my lab to work in, and the Seed Studio, first dreamed of as a writing studio back in 2004, will be made into something dreamy. That is my intention.
Gardening is a privilege and gardens are created through labor. As a skilled laborer, I honor this part of the garden more than design, but in reflecting, maybe I have something to add to this green occupation by working through, and accepting, my own unique design processes to share and to communicate in order to keep making an impact.
And for the record, I want to answer a question I am often asked. Why isn’t the garden named after Felix? Since I can’t recall if I ever wrote this publicly, Felix was not the nicest friend to Maurice before he passed away as an old man with mouth cancer. Felix AND LuLu were both disrespectful usurpers so I never feel badly that the garden is named after a cat that was honestly a lot nicer than them both. Even now as an adult, Felix has interrupted me 20 times as I’ve sat writing this. Maurice would never have done that lol. I think in their selfishness, some part of their little cat hearts knows the truth.
This was his garden, and they inherited it from him.
And lastly, if you made it this far, you should be reminded, for the 18th Blogoversary be sure to either subscribe to my site through WordPress, follow @SpiffySeeds on IG, or send a request to follow my now private account @ann.loves.plants on IG in order to be eligible for prizes that I will announce soon.
(Featured photo at the top of this post is of the front garden. Plants include: Mahonia ‘Winter Sun’, Heteromeles arbutifolia, Arbutus unedo ‘Oktoberfest’, Buxus, Pittosporum tobira ‘Variegatum’, Cupressus, and Rosmarinus officinalis ‘Spice Island’.
My intention with this planting was to create some privacy from the sidewalk since that window looks directly into the living room. I never intended that it would impact me so much in the fall when I come home from work to see it looking like this…)
Ann Loves Plants 
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