The garden
The backyard was a problem. Not a journey, but a ski-slope. All hill, no dale, dangerous and difficult to manoever. We pretty much ignored it for the first six months we lived in our house. Then our huge, three story oak tree with the breathtaking rainbow arch of a canopy FELL DOWN in the winter rains, breaking our back fence, so we had to do at least a bit of work. The arborist said it was a combination of saturated ground, the lean of the tree, and a couple of key, rotted roots. The soils engineer said the house was safe. My neighbor said, "Hey look at that! Your yard is full of sunshine now! Why, you could grow vegetables in the shady hillsides of PIEDMONT! " But I wept for the tree. It was a great beauty, old and well shaped. The squirrels frolicked in it the live long day. Frolicked, I say. But laying on the ground on top of the fence with its eight foot rootball all exposed and tentacular did us little good, so we had the tree removed.
When we bought the house, our former owner had told us that our property was much bigger than where the fence arbitrarily stopped on the hillside, that it pretty much went down to the edge of the park by the road, but who wants to take responsibility for a forest of ivy and thorny blackberry? But as the guys took out the tree, going down the hill to the park, as down is so much easier than up, branch by branch, hunk by hunk, they trampled down the ivy and blackberry, and we could see that we had a couple of large, pretty flat terraces below our broken fence. Hmm.
We had the fence rebuilt lower on the property line to include the extra terraces, and had some of the ugliest and failing hardscaping replaced. Turns out that saving out some money for landscaping was wiser than investing in the stock market this year, so we cut our hardscaping budget by two thirds. Whatever I can't manage with my own hands of the lower yard will have to wait until next year, and I'm pretty much stuck with the ugly but very functional i-beam and treated wood retaining walls, but we also have some lovely new stone walls, new stairs for the upper yard, and this week begins the installation of the banisters and arbor archway made by metal artist Michael Christian (the guy who made the famous bone archway at Burning Man).
Now that some of the hardscaping is in, I've been frantically planting a lot of seeds, bulbs, bareroots, divisions, rhizomes, and other baby plants, getting them in before the rains, planting the mail-order, half-off, end-of-season, already-sprouted plants.
I planted about three pounds of wild flower seeds on the slopes, california poppies, calendula, birdsfoot trefoil, lupines, and some california bluebells.
I began a garden for Miranda with lots of pink, which I don't ordinarily use in my own garden. With the help of my strong tree pruner Daniel who helped me start the heaviest of the scaffolding made of twisty tree branches, I've begun making her a bower-like playhouse. Needs some filling in of branches, and one white potato vine plant is not enough, needs a couple more, but it's looking very Celtic and lovely so far.
Freebies from dividing my own plants, friends, neighbors, my parents, and a couple of people from Craig's List included 50 or so big, hardy divisions of Lily of the Nile, a bushel of white and deep purple bearded irises, about two dozen butterfly lily sprouts, 40ish strawberry runners, 20 calla lily babies, a dozen yellow canna lilies, a few purple sages, and a startling geranium of hot pink edged with wine.
Things I actually paid retail for that went into Miranda's garden: Two pink christmas cacti, a low pink camelia, a tall white camelia, and a potato vine. Also bought five nice, aggressive creeping fig vines and eight creeping rosemary to help cover fugly treated wood walls. I'll need more of both.
Bought a few cheep one to three dollar rare sages, vine babies, and geraniums from Hector, a guy who propagates plants as a hobby in Albany.
Half-off bulbs that have been planted: 150 tulips, 40 yellow day lillies, 20 oriapet lilies including a few stargazer pinks for Miranda, 20 astilbes, 100 pink and white creeping phlox, 5 pink bleeding hearts, 50 pink oxalis.
In order to plant, I've been using loose, landslidey dirt from the lower yard, and making a point of digging in an earthen stairway as I fetch my bucketloads. A stair is about a bucket, and I've dug in a good forty, making my access down much easier. Hopefully the stairs will partially endure the rains, but even if they don't, I did get plenty of topsoil out of the exercise, and lost a few pounds to boot. It might be worth it to use some bender board and decomposed granite to make the hand-dug stairs more permanent. I'll have to ask my landscaper what he thinks.
The five hundred daffodil bulbs and fifty blue squill bulbs look healthy enough in storage to wait until after Thanksgiving, and I'll hold off on fruit trees and a vegetable garden until plans for the lower yard get a little clearer, but I think I've done a damn good job. I conduct the very spark of life, and I have the soil under my fingernails to prove it.
I'm afraid that except for the splendid new hardscaping, it looks a lot like it did before. But give it a couple of months. My Eden is working its way toward the sun even as I type.
When we bought the house, our former owner had told us that our property was much bigger than where the fence arbitrarily stopped on the hillside, that it pretty much went down to the edge of the park by the road, but who wants to take responsibility for a forest of ivy and thorny blackberry? But as the guys took out the tree, going down the hill to the park, as down is so much easier than up, branch by branch, hunk by hunk, they trampled down the ivy and blackberry, and we could see that we had a couple of large, pretty flat terraces below our broken fence. Hmm.
We had the fence rebuilt lower on the property line to include the extra terraces, and had some of the ugliest and failing hardscaping replaced. Turns out that saving out some money for landscaping was wiser than investing in the stock market this year, so we cut our hardscaping budget by two thirds. Whatever I can't manage with my own hands of the lower yard will have to wait until next year, and I'm pretty much stuck with the ugly but very functional i-beam and treated wood retaining walls, but we also have some lovely new stone walls, new stairs for the upper yard, and this week begins the installation of the banisters and arbor archway made by metal artist Michael Christian (the guy who made the famous bone archway at Burning Man).
Now that some of the hardscaping is in, I've been frantically planting a lot of seeds, bulbs, bareroots, divisions, rhizomes, and other baby plants, getting them in before the rains, planting the mail-order, half-off, end-of-season, already-sprouted plants.
I planted about three pounds of wild flower seeds on the slopes, california poppies, calendula, birdsfoot trefoil, lupines, and some california bluebells.
I began a garden for Miranda with lots of pink, which I don't ordinarily use in my own garden. With the help of my strong tree pruner Daniel who helped me start the heaviest of the scaffolding made of twisty tree branches, I've begun making her a bower-like playhouse. Needs some filling in of branches, and one white potato vine plant is not enough, needs a couple more, but it's looking very Celtic and lovely so far.
Freebies from dividing my own plants, friends, neighbors, my parents, and a couple of people from Craig's List included 50 or so big, hardy divisions of Lily of the Nile, a bushel of white and deep purple bearded irises, about two dozen butterfly lily sprouts, 40ish strawberry runners, 20 calla lily babies, a dozen yellow canna lilies, a few purple sages, and a startling geranium of hot pink edged with wine.
Things I actually paid retail for that went into Miranda's garden: Two pink christmas cacti, a low pink camelia, a tall white camelia, and a potato vine. Also bought five nice, aggressive creeping fig vines and eight creeping rosemary to help cover fugly treated wood walls. I'll need more of both.
Bought a few cheep one to three dollar rare sages, vine babies, and geraniums from Hector, a guy who propagates plants as a hobby in Albany.
Half-off bulbs that have been planted: 150 tulips, 40 yellow day lillies, 20 oriapet lilies including a few stargazer pinks for Miranda, 20 astilbes, 100 pink and white creeping phlox, 5 pink bleeding hearts, 50 pink oxalis.
In order to plant, I've been using loose, landslidey dirt from the lower yard, and making a point of digging in an earthen stairway as I fetch my bucketloads. A stair is about a bucket, and I've dug in a good forty, making my access down much easier. Hopefully the stairs will partially endure the rains, but even if they don't, I did get plenty of topsoil out of the exercise, and lost a few pounds to boot. It might be worth it to use some bender board and decomposed granite to make the hand-dug stairs more permanent. I'll have to ask my landscaper what he thinks.
The five hundred daffodil bulbs and fifty blue squill bulbs look healthy enough in storage to wait until after Thanksgiving, and I'll hold off on fruit trees and a vegetable garden until plans for the lower yard get a little clearer, but I think I've done a damn good job. I conduct the very spark of life, and I have the soil under my fingernails to prove it.
I'm afraid that except for the splendid new hardscaping, it looks a lot like it did before. But give it a couple of months. My Eden is working its way toward the sun even as I type.