The little fish pool and garden below our deck has become so overgrown that John has taken a chainsaw to the so-called dwarf (over 15 feet, most of them) evergreens and it all looks pretty sad.
In time it will look better. Patience, Grasshopper. We will plant more hostas and liriope--nice and low-growing. The azaleas should make a comeback, with room to breathe now. And nothing daunts forsythia. Thee might even be a spot for some blue salvia.
Coincidently, I recently discovered a bit of writing about the fish pool garden done in the late Eighties. I called it "Zen and the Art of Gardening with Dogs."
Though we have only one dog now (and he's a Very Good Boy,) I still attempt to to take a philosophic/Zen view of our land as it grows up beyond our control. We' re-wilding and helping to offset carbon emissions.
Or something.
But here's the fragment from back then:
ZEN AND THE ART OF GARDENING WITH DOGS
The dogs have worn a gap in my hedge of white azaleas and
green and gold evergreens. They have stomped the Italian Arums almost beyond
recognition and are punishing the lavender iris. The Victoria blue salvia
around the Japanese maple is a goner too. But—and this is the Zen part—I see
that a few flat stones will turn the beaten dirt of the dog trail into an
intriguing little foot path disappearing around the golden chaemocypress.
The Japanese-inspired pool garden has been shaped and
influence by our dog pack—once as many as six—as have all the plantings in my
North Carolina mountainside garden. The red thread leaf Japanese maple began
life as an umbrella-shaped (a small umbrella, mind you, the cheapest they had)
nursery specimen. That winter Amanda and Arabella (English Mastiffs around 150
pounds each who loved to chew) effectively pruned away all but one side. It
looked pathetic but a few years later, the tree had assumed a pleasing gnarled
shape.
The girls’ big paws have squashed numerous seedlings in my
unfenced vegetable garden . . . I keep the girls out of my flower beds (which
they would like to treat as dog beds) by the judicious placement of large
attractive rocks—something we have plenty of. . .
And here the writing ends, except for a scrawled
note—Too stoned to go on.
The Siberian Iris in the little bed in front of the greenhouse have been in dire need of thinning and transplanting for several years now. What with one thing and another, I'm only now getting to it.
But the good news is that a year ago, I wasn't strong enough to even think about hoicking the thick mats of iris. Thanks to my strict regime of occupational therapy with Josie, now I can do it. Not quickly, but I can do it. I spent part of a day getting out two five gallon buckets full and gave them to Justin to plant down in their yard. Yesterday I went at it again.
But first I prepared a place to plant them. The Stairs of Doom, as a friend named them (for the perilous nature of the uneven steps and steep descent) are just beside our front porch. How pretty, I thought, if there were a cascade of Siberian Iris flanking them.
And lo! it came to pass! My gardener's eye sees ahead to a future spring when the deep purple of the iris will look like a waterfall beside the steps.
I've only dug up about half of the iris. But I have plans for the rest. And plans for the bed where they were.
2. (in Greek tragedy) Excessive pride toward or defiance of the gods, leading to nemesis.
Too much self confidence led me to set out the maters on Tuesday -- before the 'safe ' date of May 15. Then frost and perhaps freezing temperatures were predicted for Wednesday night so John and I covered the plants with hay. Will they survive?
This sudden dip in temperatures is called Blackberry Winter -- a cold snap that happens when the blackberries are in bloom. It's obviously common enough to have a name . . . what was I thinking -- defying the gods that way?
Back in 1976 when first I began to landscape around our house, I was crazy for trees and shrubs that bloomed -- forsythia, weigelia, mock orange. If it didn't flower, I wasn't interested. Fortunately, these were all plants that were easily obtained as starts from friends and neighbors. And they prospered and Spring and early Summer were a riot of bloom.
But unfortunately, all these beautiful shrubs turned into a bunch of brown sticks, come Fall and Winter.
Then I began reading gardening magazines and books. There was all this talk about about form and texture in the garden and talk of 'evergreen tapestries.'
I began to pay attention to junipers and chaemocypress and Dwarf Alberta spruces. Up close, that boring green foliage had different forms --
star-like. . or lacy . . .
And evergreens aren't just green -- they're yellow and silver and they come in different shapes!
When you plant them all together, they do, indeed, make a tapestry! Wow! And they look good all year long -- a revelation!
"It was the sweetest, most mysterious-looking place any one could imagine. The high walls which shut it in were covered with the leafless stems of climbing roses which were so thick that they were matted together. Mary Lennox knew they were roses because she had seen a great many roses in India. All the ground was covered with grass of a wintry brown and out of it grew clumps of bushes which were surely rosebushes if they were alive. There were numbers of standard roses which had so spread their branches that they were like little trees.
There were other trees in the garden, and one of the things which made the place look strangest and loveliest was that climbing roses had run all over them and swung down long tendrils which made light swaying curtains, and here and there they had caught at each other or at a far-reaching branch and had crept from one tree to another and made lovely bridges of themselves.
There were neither leaves nor roses on them now and Mary did not know whether they were dead or alive, but their thin gray or brown branches and sprays looked like a sort of hazy mantle spreading over everything, walls, and trees, and even brown grass, where they had fallen from their fastenings and run along the ground. It was this hazy tangle from tree to tree which made it all look so mysterious. Mary had thought it must be different from other gardens which had not been left all by themselves so long; and indeed it was different from any other place she had ever seen in her life."
I've always loved The Secret Gardenby Frances Hodgson Burnett and though there are no walls and only one rose, when I tackled this area yesterday, it was the long forgotten and much overgrown secret garden of the book that came to mind.
There's the blue bench Elizabeth and Phillip sit on in one novel -- it was being covered up by apple and forsythia branches. Elsewhere wild grapevines were hiding the rhododenrons and the smoke tree. What was a lovely garden room a few years ago is, to use a technical term, a BIG MESS.
Alas! I've let Elizabeth's garden go while trying to tell her story. In the best of all possible worlds, those stories would have brought in enough income to hire some help -- Julio? Homero? Donde estan?
Not here, more's the pity. So yesterday I took pruning shears and loppers and began to rediscover my garden. A hint of blue was winking at me from beyond a green fountain of forsythia and I hacked my way through to find a forgotten lace cap hydrangea -- a nice reward for a sweaty few hours.
Today I'll attack the wilderness once more -- load the clippings up and take them to our brush pile and resume my battle with the wild grape.
As I recall, there's a Kousa dogwood back in there.
The area just below our deck -- surrounding the little goldfish pool -- was meant to be a sort of Appalachian version of a Japanese garden. There are azaleas -- all white for a serene feeling, a red lthread-leaved Japanese maple, forsythia, Japanese boxwoods, a yew, a crabapple and any number of dwarf evergreens in a dazzling array of green, yellow, and silver foliage types.
At least, when I bought and planted those evergreens twenty some years ago, they were labeled 'dwarf.'But they've grown and grown and grown till they are shading out the azaleas, blocking our view, and pretty much hiding the fish pool but for a tiny peek.
The rhododendrons and yew were trying to hide the Japanese maple and a particularly aggressive Virginia Creeper was covering up the Dwarf Alberta Spruce.
What's more, one of the tallest evergreens was bowed and broken by last December's heaavy snow.
Time for Tough Love, also known as Major Pruning!
I crawled about in this jungle, wielding long-handled loppers and pruning shears, while John and his chain saw dealt with the really big stuff. And John and the Kubota hauled away the trimmings to a brush pile down in one of our fields.
Now the Dwarf Alberta and the Japanese Maple can breathe! The rhododendrons look awful and we'll have no blooms to speak of next year but I suspect they'll be back by the following year.
We can see the fishpool again, as well as its little waterfall. We can see the graceful shape of the crabapple's trunk.
And most of the bent- over gold evergreen has been removed. The branches that remain will probably go vertical and become leaders and in another ten or twenty years they will probably have to come down.
It's a start -- there is a lot more to remove so that the azaleas can bee seen. And there are many, many more areas of our yard that need Tough Love. And the yard of our rental house is due for refurbishing.
But just for now, I think I'll collapse with a cider. And some ibuprohen. I'm exhausted but aglow with virtue!
A gardener is a person of faith --who looks at little green tomatoes and plans spicy sauces and salsas, salads with rich red slices glistening with olive oil, the first wonderful bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich of the season . . .
The gardener looks at the compost and grass seed and hay and sees a lush green lawn in the making . . .
Tiny green figs? A future delight -- get the prosciutto ready!
And sometimes the faith is rewarded -- as when a 3 dollar bare-root rose takes hold, climbs and blooms -- just as it was supposed to do.
