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Garden Trails

Welcome to my garden!  Over the next weeks, I will write the history of my garden and eventually post my very own gardening tips.

Enjoy the pictures. This garden has been a labour of love.  It all started out by accident.  When we moved into the homestead a number of years ago, there were no flower beds really.  I had plans to get rid of the nasty slope we had to cut grass on.  It was the difference in level between our lot and the  neighbour’s  which had been back-filled when the house was built many years ago.  It was a difference of about four feet and really hard to mow. I planned to improve it by slowly turning it into a flower bed of some sort.  I started with a narrow strip of annuals and perennials that I begged and borrowed from family and friends. This strip went from the garage to the top of that slope, and then I cut up about four feet of sod along the neighbour’s driveway and planted perennials and annuals there too.  I would sit beside the garage, coffee cup in hand, and look at that slope and dream of how it would look-all organized and symmetrical and never a weed in it.  Maybe, someday, I could add one along the bottom of the property as well and plant some cedars for a hedge.

Spring the following year brought a surprise.  The grubs had been very busy over the winter and destroyed almost half of the property between our driveway and the neighbours’.  Wow! It didn’t take me long to figure out that instead of spending money to get rid of grubs and planting grass seed, I could just turn over the sod, feed the grubs to the birds and ants, or just stomp on them, and voila! I would have my garden. That was a very busy summer.

This is the short version.   Here’s the real story:

Accidental Gardening (or How to Get Around “No More Gardens, Dear!”

Oh boy, oh boy! I looked around and rubbed my hands with glee.  New home, no flower beds to be seen—a blank sheet.

The year was 2000, and we had just moved into the ancestral home in a city of 36,000, after twenty-eight years of country living.  At the time it suited us to make the move into the city because the siblings were not yet ready to let the family home go to strangers and my husband and I spent more time in town than at our home because of work. It was just to be ‘fer now’.  Yeah right. My epitaph will read: “We’ll plant her here–fer now”.  Over the years we’ve done so many things ‘fer now’, that have turned permanent, you’d think I’d know better.

Leaving the organizing and settling in until later, I wandered around the barren yard, visualising how it would look with a few flowers. My in-laws weren’t into gardening. The existing one consisted of a bleeding heart planted close to the house. The soil skirting the south side of the house was baked solid. Everywhere else, a layer of moss-covered gravel barely hid the rocks and stones of an old gravel pit—the foundation for my new gardens. What a dreamer I was.

Our neighbours had back-filled when they built forty years ago, leaving a drop of about four feet between their property and our side yard. Cutting it was a huge pain. The wrist on the down side of the mower hurt like crazy because of the steep angle. One summer of that was enough. I love cutting the lawn, but that was ridiculous. As I toiled in the blazing sun, I figured out a plan. This 90 degree slope was going to be turned into a perennial garden.

“It’ll just be the width of the slope and no more,” I promised my doubtful husband.  “Honest. I promise.”

The look in his eyes told me he knew better. He’d seen the results of my gardening adventures out in the country.

“Well, maybe I’ll add a narrow strip to connect the new garden to the garage, you, know, pull it all together. And it won’t be a straight line—it’ll have interest.”

As if. There was no way I would ever stay within those boundaries and we both knew it, but my husband also knew he was a beaten man.

“Look at it this way,” I bargained. “It’s grass that we won’t need to cut.”

And there it began.  I dug a strip about four feet wide in a straight line. That soil hadn’t been worked in a millennium and was rock hard. The interesting lines would have to come later. After turning the sod under, I planted whatever I could beg or borrow right into the freshly turned soil.  The way I looked at it, it was so poor, the overturned grass would die because it was looking at the sky through its roots and they’d  be so confused they’d just wither up and die. They did. The perennials grew.

It’s really hard to dig while you’re on a major tilt—one foot about three feet lower than the other. And when the soil’s rock hard and full of stones, big ones at that, it’s really tricky. It was a good task to work on after a frustrating day in the classroom. It was such a difficult job I got about four feet done along the neighbours’ driveway and quit, figuring I’d complete the rest when spring arrived.  That was a good decision.  You see, when I come up with scatter-brained ideas, I don’t like to ask for help and I also don’t want to ask for a back rub to ease those tilted muscles. I had to put it off for the good of my health.

Oh it was going to be lovely.  I’d sit in my plastic lawn chair under the maple tree and dream of just how lovely my perennial ‘rock garden’ would be—undulating curves from top to bottom—evenly laid out following the graceful pattern of a garden hose. The plants would be perfectly balanced, a garden of symmetry—something my husband would love.  I could hardly wait, but I also couldn’t bear to do any more at the time.

It was a good thing I waited. In the spring a gigantic surprise awaited me. The grubs had had a picnic over the winter and killed two-thirds of the lawn between our driveway and our neighbours.

“Well,” I said to my husband as we stood and surveyed the dead mass, “my long-range plan was to convert this whole area into a walking trail anyway, like the one we saw at Canada Blooms.” The look that statement got me should have rooted me to the spot. I forgot.  I hadn’t planned to tell him that yet. I used the old ‘grass we won’t have to cut’ trick once again and, well, it actually worked. My husband went for the idea.

I was on my own to bring it all about though.  He had enough to do to restore a fifties house from years of sorrow and neglect. You can park four vehicles in our driveway, and I turned over that length by thirty feet wide with a pointed shovel, and killed every single grub I found.  It was more difficult where they hadn’t killed the grass but I did it.

Once the job was finished, I took out my white plastic lawn chair and sat down under the maple tree again, and I planned.

“This is going to be expensive,” was my first thought. “I didn’t think about that.” The soil was pretty bad, hard, clumpy, wet at the bottom end, no, make that soggy at the bottom end in the spring, mossy and rocky. Well, it was back to begging and borrowing.

Friends are great, you know.  I took every single plant that was offered, and where there were still holes, I dug wild flowers out of the grass at the park, or in the ditches.  I started a cedar hedge too, from seedlings that I found in fields, ditches and beside lakes.

The years have passed. The garden’s definitely not symmetrical. The cheap mulch we got at Co-op defines the walking trail now, and the thin layer of red bark mulch on the flower beds will be scraped off.  It’s too expensive, and the soil needs to be tilled.

The garden is a sight to behold, alive with colour, fragrance and butterflies, in spite of the gravel and rocks, with very little amendment to the soil.  I love to sit on the wood and wrought iron park bench with horses on the back, under the maple tree and soak it all up.  The mess behind me is gone, given away and stowed away in the garage and garden shed.  A shiny new greenhouse has passed its first winter, and that’s another story. The spot where I tried a vegetable garden close to the house was too shady for vegetables, but just right for hostas and obedience plants. It’s amazing.

The gardens are a pleasure to behold, but also a pleasure to tend. Surprisingly, they are not a lot of work. A few full mornings throughout the summer and they’re good to go. The asclepias I bought as an orange ‘Butterfly Plant’ turned out to be common milkweed.  I let it grow because the monarch butterflies love it, but it’s gone now—it’s just too coarse and it spreads by runners. The spearmint smells lovely, tastes great, but it also spreads rampantly by runners. It’s mostly gone too. And then the wild artemesia I brought home from Alberta—it went. Silly me, I should have known that when there are fields of it, to stay away.  It’s pretty but I’ll keep a bit in a pot.  It has a tendency to spread prolifically too. Other than that, most of the perennials are restrained.

My husband cuts the lawn mostly now.  Our corner lot is a large one, and as corner lots go, there’s really no distinction between ‘front’ yard and ‘back’ yard.  It’s just yard with a whole lot of grass to cut. The front edge was a mighty steep one between the top of our lawn and the level of the road. It was going to be too much for us in a few more years. We know, because we cut the neighbours’ grass on his front lawn where it dropped to the street because his elderly legs couldn’t manage.

It sure looks nice as a flower garden.