I haven’t written from a while because my little family has been driving across the country to move from the familiar Utah to brand new Atlanta. We took four and a half days and drove a mini van packed full with our belongings across the varied landscapes of Utah, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama and finally into Georgia.

I moved from snow-capped mountains, to deserts, than boring flatlands that turned into red-soiled hills. Than came more and more trees (“woods” don’t really exist in the west without mountains involved). My favorite part of the drive was the Ozarks/River bottoms in Arkansas where we spent a night, a small walk, and an interesting game of disk golf.

At every landscape change I thought about gardening there. I wonder if the red clay soil would be as difficult to work with as it looks, how it would be to garden in a swamp, and the advantage of actually having natural growing trees in an area rather than having to plant them all.

I can no longer identify all the common landscape plants. The trees aren’t leaved out and herbaceous plants are dormant, but even ignoring them there is a lot I don’t know. There’s actually broad leaf evergreen trees out here. No such thing grows in Utah.

It’s the start of a new year and it will be a different one. Right now I’m excited for it all.