Giving journals as gifts can be a tricky matter. Will they be used and loved, or will they collect dust on a shelf? By now, I’m fairly particular about the journals I use. They must be Paperblanks. Why bother doing all that art in a book that’s going to fall apart or that has heavy, distracting lines in it? So when I do give journals as gifts, I try to find really good ones, and think a lot about the user’s personality.

This is the cover of a journal I gave to my husband’s grandmother, Blanche Darnell, around Thanksgiving 2001. At the time she was living in Heather House, a cozy dwelling she designed herself in Mendocino, California. She also designed the gardens, and that’s where the house got its name. Blanche is not the sort of grandmother that gardens by putting a pot of pansies out on her porch. No, she goes big. And when she’s finished with her own yard, so that there’s no grass left because the entire yard is landscaped with beautiful plants, she starts in on her neighbors’ yards. Which they love, because she does really good work. When she designed the gardens for Heather House, she invited all the grandchildren out for a summer “vacation”, which amounted to building miles of rock walls, and planting about 250 heather plants. Some vacation. That’s one way to keep the grandkids out of trouble!

Well, I got the idea that since she knows so much about plants, she might want to keep track of all that info, and pass it on to the rest of us. I did the cover illustration of one of her heather beds with colored pencils. I try to personalize gift journals so that the user will feel special and worthy of writing or drawing his or her story. If you don’t feel your story’s important, you won’t write it down. Plus, sometimes the first page is the scariest. But if there’s already a nifty picture or quote there, it takes some of the pressure off. Still, I knew Blanche liked to draw, but I wasn’t sure she would actually use the journal.

But she did! It wasn’t the happiest time when we had to fly back out to California for her memorial service in January 2005, but looking at her art certainly was a healing moment. I found this journal again after 4 years. It was tucked in a shelf between about 20 other volumes dating all the way back to 1946. She, too, had been keeping journals since she was in high school (just like me!) and I never knew it. There was the “Gardens of Blanche” journal - full of sketches, notes, plant tags, and photos of her gardens.

Sometimes the gift of a journal is just the right thing. Here’s one of the spreads from that journal:

*I’ll include some of her other journals in later posts.