So, a brief description of Pinterest from the demi-ignorant. An admission from the outset: the time I have been spending on Pinterest is wonder blunder. The feeling is like being on a horse that is about to bolt.
There are mouthwatering pictures to distract and without any discipline, buttons get pushed. I tried, for instance, to embed an image found there on Pinterest on this blog. A lovely astrantia seen so close up that I felt like a questing bee.
I have no idea where it has been sent. Plus the embedding notion slightly freaks me. Alarmingly my take up of said images onto one of my "boards" seems to have buried a handbag pic somewhere in my computer. Is this safe? Is it sane? Addictive for sure: what am I doing 'repinning' an image of a polar bear diving for breakfast and, David Attenburgh-like, starting a new board about wildlife? Definitely outside my expertise.
What you do is go into the site. Sign on and all that palaver. Then you can make yourself boards on which to pin images. Said images can come from your internet trawl, your own photo-library or get shared around Pinterest. That, as far as can be gauged, is what the P peeps like best. It is fabulously easy: go to a website, press an installed pin button and bingo you can help yourself to what you want. The image arrives with a credit and I'm assuming that all is well on the copyright front.
The beauty of this for the garden designer is more than obvious. It gives the opportunity to make up wonderful mood boards for projects, or collect together a series of images for research. Or all the rest.....a photolibrary of objects, say gates, wacky hedges, architectural plants. Then you can send customers in to have a look. Discipline however needs to be stern or all day could go in Pinterestland.
Then (and to the bottom of this I simply have not got) there are the stakes of self-publicity. If your image gets pinned on and on I guess you could become some sort of a pin celeb. That's it. Any more enlightenment from anyone else would be more than welcome. And by the way, fell down totally on the embedding - the blue poppies did not make it unaided out of Pinterland.
