This original incarnation of the gimcw.org website I created in response to the HUGE amount of information coming through the Medit-Plants email forum I started in 1994. Coincidentally, the Mediterranean Garden Society (MGS) also started at the same time and I was actually communicating with its founder, Derek Toms.
In My History with the MGS post, I discuss the sequence of events that led to me creating this website. I mention the book by the Mallorcan nurseryman, Hugo Latymer’s, as well as Trevor Nottle’s, an Australian author, own work about mediterranean climate (MC) gardening. Each of these authors had a great impact on me.
So, Hugo was first to push for collecting information flowing through Medit-Plants onto a website. I suspect I may have gotten around to it at some point, but Hugo was quite persistent. I understood – I was already trying to figure out who had written what and when in the large collection of Medit-Plants e-mails I was saving to a folder on my server!!
We came up with a rough website framework and other members of the forum were invited to provide feedback. It was exciting to see the forum members positive reactions! So many ideas! Lots of offers of information!! Wow! Guess it was a go!
I was learning about the mediterranean climate just like everyone else, so there were lots of changes as new information became available and suggestions were made by those who viewed the site. Very interactive! An exciting time.
My background in print media and graphic design helped me create these new virtual ‘pages’ (it was so cool that mistakes could be easily fixed with a few changes in the code!). But writing was not one of my strengths – having minor dyslexia I always struggled – so I had a lot to learn. Web page coding was obviously NOT created by graphic designers, so I had to experiment with various ‘tricks’ to create the aspects of effective page design I had been taught and personally picked up over the years.
After working on a variety of projects people brought to me for most of my design experience, creating a project that I was personally energized about was an exciting experience.
Through the international membership of Medit-Plants, the website seemed to garner international interest. No one was gathering usage stats yet at this early stage of the Internet, but I was suddenly being contacted by new people in far-flung places. Figuring out how to get them connected to the new online community became part of the work.
No one was more surprised than I when a certain e-mail appeared in my inbox (I wish I still had it – that server was retired decades ago). Basically, it was a very well thought out short essay about how to present information on the new technology of web pages, and how the author thought our mcgttw.org website represented many of the elements he felt was so critical!
I managed to find some pages online that mentioned his work, and read more about his efforts to educate those in this new medium, speaking at conferences, universities, etc. Pondering why he thought our web site stood out, I did some ‘web surfing’ to see what else was out there (new web pages were being added by the thousands each month!). Seeing what was being published on the new web, I began to see why he was so passionate about improving the quality of online presentation.
In my reply to his e-mail, I stated that because of my training in print media, I could not help but do things in the way I did. He introduced me to the idea of a page being ‘content driven’, and that this is what caught his attention about our site (I could not imagine why anyone would NOT put content first!)
Consider this: You’ve found a link somewhere for an article that you find interesting; following the link, you are brought to a page where there is indeed an article, but embedded around it are flashing ads, popups, and links to other articles, making it hard to continue reading. You’ve all seen this kind of web page.
This distracting stuff was present almost from the very start of the public Internet. The more things change, the more they stay the same! I have fought against the intrusion of this kind of unrelated content for as long as I have been building web pages, but even today it is not always possible.
After that time, I started working on this web project with various people I had met in person years before. None of them were still local to me, but we’d been in touch via the Medit-Plants email forum. They stepped forward to participate in the mcgttw.org project. We all came to agree that the ‘mediterranean climate gardening throughout the world’ domain was cumbersome. Many ideas where floated among my new team as well as the Medit-Plants forum. Eventually we decided on ‘gardening in mediterranean climates worldwide’ (the gimcw.org domain, which was registered in 2004) even though it still didn’t easily roll off the tongue!!
References and Links
The Medit-Plants email forum. (a page on this site)
Razelou, Sally. Genesis: The Inception of the MGS. The Mediterranean Garden Society. https://www.mediterraneangardensociety.org/genesis.html (*January 2024)
Addendum
A while ago, I happened to mention to the gimcw.org team that our website was once known as mcgttw.org. Team member Steve said he’d never heard of it. I responded that this was some time ago and there certainly would be no record of its existence. He took that as a challenge, Googling if this was true (I knew there was a reason I liked this guy!). He found that there were still a number of old websites citing defunct mcgttw.org site even today!!
gardening in mediterranean climates worldwide 