Let the marathon begin.  This is not a sprint, or a 5K.  This is the long haul.  Only to be undertaken by Naive Optimists who have no idea of what they’re getting themselves into.  Hopeless Dreamers.  People With No Sense of Proportion.  (That would be us).

People seem to like it, too.

We started with a clean slate – 70 feet of downhill turf.  No trees, no flowers.  And because of the slope, not of much interest to the kids except when it snowed (which in not that often in North Carolina).  It’s been my experience that, except for weekly mowing and the occasional barbeque, backyards are the sole province of dogs.  We never see anyone using their yards.  Even those that have swing sets only have children in them when the children have company (and only then for an hour or so).  It seems like a waste.

And, like most back yards, ours had very little privacy.  Even less than normal because ours sloped down (to a creek) and the the yards behind us sloped up.  So everyone had a clear view of everyone else.  We did originally  have a giant maple right behind the carport, but it was the same age as those in the front (old) and it too had to be taken out (it was a little dangerous because of its size).

We foolishly thought that the kids would use the yard if it were flat.  Since we were having our basement expanded (a whole other story), we used the dirt from that project to level the back yard.  When I say “dirt” I mean clay, and after 60 years of being under a house, it was completely sterile, but the yard was level.  Mostly.

Now, when you own a 60 year old house there really isn’t much upkeep (that’s sarcasm, by the way), so we thought “Hey, we’ll have a garden” and began to plant things.  Wherever.  We’d find something nice at a plant store or yard sale, we’d bring it home, dig a hole and plant it.  It didn’t work.  Oh, the plants grew alright.  And it didn’t really look bad. If you have a beautiful plant then, at least while it’s blooming, you have a beautiful plant.  And if you have a lot of beautiful plants, well…. it can look nice.  And we still had plenty of grass to mow.    But by now we had decided that we wanted not a garden, but a Garden.  So it begins.

We started reading.  We’ve always liked visiting gardens, but now we had a purpose – to find things to copy.  We read magazines, books, anything we could get our hands on.  We made lists of what we would use the yard for if we actually used the yard.  We talked about what we really liked in the gardens we visited.  And what did we like?  We like seating areas in little secret spots.  We like paths that bend and make you wonder what’s around the next turn.  We like saying “I wonder where that goes?”   We like birds and butterflys.  And of course we like interesting plants with beautiful flowers and interesting leaves or bark or habit.  We like gardens that look like lovely postcards.  We had a pretty long list actually.  And about 3500 square feet to do it in.

Next post:  The planning stage.

Filed under: Our Garden