Welcome to Our Garden in the City.
Gus guards the garden
Welcome to “A Garden in the City”. In the coming months, this blog will deal with all things that connect “urban” and “gardening”. Look for pictures of local gardens, articles about plants, pests and diseases, and the joys of having a small patch of green in a busy city. We hope to have interviews with gardeners, columnists and horticulturists. And we may even wax esoteric from time to time about the many joys (and headaches) of having a small haven that offers peace, serenity, distraction and beauty.
Louisiana black game cock iris
Let us introduce ourselves: Our names are Sherry and Bill Beasley. We live in the medium sized city of Winston Salem in North Carolina. The region is known as the Piedmont (according to Wikipedia, “Piemonte is a contraction of the Italian “Ai piedi del monte”, meaning “At the foot of the mountain”"). Think lush rolling hills. The neighborhood is called Ardmore. We’re in plant Zone 7a. In the late 1920s, when our house was built, it was one of the original “suburbs” of Winston Salem. Now it’s firmly “in town” and is one of the largest historic districts in the South East, if not THE largest. Our house sits on one fifth of an acre and, along with the carport and driveway, the house takes up over half of that. So we have less than one tenth of an acre in which to actually garden. Bill is the primary designer – the layout and the hardscaping. Sherry is the primary gardener. But not exclusively so. We have over a dozen trees and more than a couple of hundred different plants, and it has become our own little park – with several separate seating areas and lots of paths to walk. It seems much larger than the dimensions would suggest. We have no grass to mow.
Oh My!
The garden has gone through several incarnations. We’ll be posting some before, during and after photos and descriptions.
If there is a topic you would like addressed, feel free to use the comment link below to make a comment. And, although we’ll mostly be using our own city as a resource and an example, we won’t be doing so exclusively. So feel free to comment, suggest and question, no matter where you’re from.
Filed under: Our Garden
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Congrats on the new site, Sherry, and I’ll look forward to seeing how it grows!
Hello folks! I am so glad to see you doing this. It is a marvelous story, of which I only know a fraction. I can’t wait to see the history unfold. Remember nearly 8 years ago (before so much has been transformed since), that I compared your garden to those exotic gardens I witnessed in South Korea?
Best wishes, MES
I’ve seen 1st hand just how beautiful your garden is. Over the years, I have really down-sized my garden, concentrating on attracting butterflies and gold finches. For your readers, here is an idea for other grandparents out there like us who have accumulated bicycles in all shapes in sizes. I took the smallest one I could find, spray painted it white, and put a potted mum in the basket. Then I placed the bike in the middle of my flower garden. I plan on changing the items in the basket to fit the season. I’m just sorry that my digital camera “bit the dust” so it looks like I will have to send you a photo the old-fashioned way. USPS!!
Received your pictures today — what a great idea to paint the bikes and create garden art! Your front yard and porch area look beautiful. Very creative and welcoming.