The Quarantine Is Real

Friends, ProfessorRoush wouldn't be blogging again quite so soon, but he noticed an interesting little fact after he finished Saturday's blog.  While checking the statistics for Garden Musings, I was astonished to see that blog traffic from Italy had risen to 2nd place over the past week, behind only the United States.  You can see that depicted in graphic splendor on the map on the right, the prominent medium-green boot under Europe.  Welcome, my Italian gardening amici and amiche!

Since this blog started, a decade ago, Italy is in 7th place all time in blog visitors, behind the United States (always #1!), Russia, Germany, Ukraine, Canada, and France.  I would like to believe that the massive increase in interest from Italy has occurred because I've recently written some stellar Tuscany-relative plant potboilers.  However, the hard truth is that I am forced to conclude that there are at least a few incredibly-bored gardeners in Italy who have quarantined themselves and, having exhausted Netflix and AmazonPrime, decided the next best time-occupier is to read the blog of some gardening weirdo in forgotten Kansas.

Yes, I know 174 visitors from Italy may not push me across the edge to stardom as the next great garden prophet, but from another perspective, compared to the numbers from the U.S., Italy normally is about 3.5% of the U.S. total.  This past week those numbers are 50% of the U.S. total!  It has to be coronavirus quarantine-driven, doesn't it?  Please though, don't ask me to speculate why the numbers from Turkmenistan are up.  I can't even find the latter on a map.

My beleaguered Italian friends, I hope you stay well and can get back into your own gardens soon, whether that garden is the small balcony planter that I imagine hanging over your ancient cobblestone streets, or it is an entire square mile planted with lavender, laurel, and rosemary surrounding a country villa.  If it helps you pass time reading of roses and forsythia in Kansas, if you are amused by pitched battles against Japanese Beetles, rose rosette disease, and sun-scorched drought, then please keep reading away.  In the end, if my small script in life was to help you keep off the plague-ridden streets, then I'm content that I've served in this smallest of ways.