another voice joins me in the ‘garden’

WHEN MY FAVORITE DOODLER AND DAYDREAMER, British-born Andre Jordan, let me share an oddball illustration of his with you in June, it was an immediate hit: my third most popular post so far, in fact. Now Andre is living in the American heartland, and besides his weekly doodling gig on BBC.com he’s signed on as a columnist for…you guessed it: A Way to Garden.

I’ve been asked various times this year, in interviews about my own new life, whether I’d have other contributors to this blog, which represents my first act of personal (not corporate) creative expression in far too many years.

“Absolutely not,” I’d say without a second’s reflection. “This is about my voice.”

How someone who five months ago was a total stranger could have me eating those words is not so easy to explain.

Andre and I still have never met, with only blog comments, Skype sessions and emails forming the concrete connection, but this goes deeper:

From the first doodle of his I ever saw, I knew Andre was a bird of a feather.  And you all know how I feel about birds.

Much of the prolific doodling that first drew me to Andre is on his blog A Beautiful Revolution, named one of the Best British blogs of 2007 and praised by the London Times as “brim[ming] with honesty, dry wit and a refreshing lack of schmaltz.”

Andre is also an author, with his first American book, “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now,” due momentarily from Harper Perennial and available for pre-order.

His work can also be found on the BBC disability website Ouch!, where he with raucous tenderness explores a subject that had long been something you just didn’t talk about, like many of Andre’s recurring themes.

Andre, it turns out, is no stranger to the garden: He supplies one of the leading garden picture libraries, GPL, with glorious photographs. In his Thursday column here he’ll explore all of gardening’s facets, dire to delightful, rated PG to R, and he will jump in on comments each week to speak with you.

I keep wondering when Andre’s latest vein of inspiration, his new life in Lincoln, Nebraska, will be put to paper. So far, the reports are good:

“I love it,” says Andre. “And people in the supermarket or on the street talk to me for no reason whatsoever—something that would never happen in the UK. It’s brilliant.”

Please join me and the friendly citizens of Lincoln in giving Andre a proper welcome.