Form and Texture

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!

I still like flowers, though.

The Secret Garden?

"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 Garden by 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. 

Onward!

Tough (Plant) Love

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 Person of Faith

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.