Gardens change.   All the time.  Plants grow…. or die.   Bulbs naturalize and spread.   Things need thinning.  You change your mind about a certain section. 

Or, like us, your own life is changing.  

Our garden has seen many many stages.  For most of its life, it’s been a sun garden.  Lots of flowering plants that needed lots of sun and water.  I, especially, like large masses of flowering plants for the drama.   Nothing is as dramatic as a twenty square foot display of bright red tulips – or double yellow daffodils.  

But our lives are changing.  The largest change is that we’re aging.  We’re fine right now, and have no problems doing tons and tons of gardening – truckloads of mulch, moving stone, building walls and so on.  But the day is coming…  first when we can do all that but no longer want to (that day is coming soon), and then when we just won’t be able to do it (still many years away,we hope, but make no mistake — it’s coming). 

So… what to do about that?   

Another change in our lives is that we want to actually use the garden for more than gardening.  GardenING in the past has been our therapy, our exercise and our “together” time (and even our “alone” time).  We’re getting to the point that we want the GARDEN rather than the gardenING to be those things.   And we’re aware that, being a sun garden, there are times when we just can’t use the garden as much as we’d like.   Why?  You guessed it – because it’s too sunny.  

And there’s still another reason we want to limit our gardening.   I’m retiring in a few years, and we plan to travel a bit more than we do now.   We already have eliminated the worry about the grass being a foot high every time we return from a trip — we don’t have any grass.  But when I retire, we may be gone for long periods at a time.  We’re looking into house swapping for month long periods.   We don’t want our fellow swappers to have to do anything in the garden, or to have it look scraggly.    So.

Age, use and time away from home.   Solution?   We’re moving to shade gardening.   We’re planting trees and shrubs, putting in seating areas, walls and paths.  It’s looking good and is going to accomplish what we hope, but in the here and now it presents several problems – the biggest of which is that it’s not good to dig around the roots of all these trees.  

Wouldn’t it be great to still have all the flowers while the trees are growing?   Unfortunately, limiting the digging limits the flowers.   We still have lots of flowers, most of which have been in place for a long time, but they tend to migrate somewhat on their own, so we don’t have the lovely daffodil borders along the walkways or the large areas of dahlias and so forth.  The look now is more scattered.   So the garden doesn’t have the drama it once did.  

On the plus side, we’ve put in two sitting areas that we’re going to be able to use a LOT more than in the past.  That will be nice.   To be able to sit in the shade on a sunny day and enjoy the garden without sweating.  And now that we have two Japanese cherries in the front yard, we’ll even be able to use our front porch during the afternoon.   THAT will be nice.  

We’ll continue to have some sun garden in the front, but the back is going to be much more shader.  There are a lot of shade loving plants, and we already have hostas and ferns and the like.  We’ll keep you posted.

Filed under: Our Garden