Stories: The Garden

I never liked history class.  Dates, places, and important people that did important things have never been able to hold my interest for very long, even though I wish I had more of a palate and memory for such details.  What I do love are stories; the intricate details of one’s everyday life hold endless fascination for me.  I could spend hours reading about how settlers made clothing, how certain tools were used on farms, or what plants were used to treat common ailments.  I am endlessly curious about how people spend their time between the walls of their homes, how they live day to day, where they love to sit for a quiet moment of thinking, or which window’s view captivates their imagination. 

As such, it only feels right to mark, for memory’s sake, some of the places that we have loved while living here.  We’ll begin in the garden:

When we moved into our house there was a gravel driveway leading up to the garage and the rest of the lot up to the trees was a mixture of what looked like beach sand and really tall weeds.  We started, quite literally, from scratch.  We made so many mistakes along the way but we learned a lot of lessons, too.  Once the driveway was paved and the sidewalks were poured our garden changed in shape from a straight line of woeful-looking bushes to a curvy, interactive space that invites you to walk through it. 

I can tell you where each and every plant came from, the story of how we got it, where we first planted it, how we tweaked its location in the garden to give it more sun, more water from the gutter’s downspout, or just to better place it aesthetically.  I placed every stone in that rock wall, and Brendan carefully made the path that meanders through the plants. 

A butterfly bush from my mother’s yard.

A hydrangea bud on the bush that began as a stick with one leaf, purchased for $1.00 at the Farmer’s Market our first spring.  The bush is now so big that we have divided it at least four times and we still have to hack it back every autumn.

What you cannot see in these pictures of our gardening success is our lawn-growing failure.  There is a reason that sandy beaches are sandy: grass cannot grow on them.  We have fought a good fight, but realistically we have too much area designated for grass and not enough time and resources to actually make grass grow.  So our garden is a delight and our lawn is nearly non-existent, more of a headache than anything.  While many people we know think we’re crazy to go from our nearly two acre lot to one just bigger than a postage stamp, we think we’re making a brilliant move.  Because gardening we can handle, but putting in lawns and maintaining their water-sucking, fertilizer hungry, green expanses is just not something we get a lot of joy out of and life is certainly too short to spend a lot of time doing something that brings no joy.

Saying goodbye to this garden, this home, will not be easy.  But a new yard beckons and the lessons we learned here will come with us to the new yard and house.  And that postage stamp lot?  It already has a healthy lawn of grass, but it could use a few lovely gardens.