Rescuing a garden - #91

Knee deep in weeds.

Sometime in the depths of the pandemic, I discovered British gardening. Days were lost on YouTube to Garden Rescue, Big Dreams Small Spaces, Your Garden Made Perfect, and others. I was enthralled by the dissonance between Charlie Dimmock’s wild whimsy and the Rich brothers’ hipster modernism, by how British women seemed to wet themselves over Monty Don, and mostly by how transformed everyone’s spaces looked with what seemed like a reasonable budget.

I’ve never had a garden before. In Ohio, my mom hung geraniums from the front porch every summer, and I shoveled manure to deliver to neighbors’ gardens. But there wasn’t a garden. We didn’t grow anything, save for the things that grew wild: crabapples, blackberries, and buttercups. The closest I got to yard work was riding the lawnmower in a bikini top listening to The Matrix soundtrack on my Walkman for a long summer afternoon, imagining a life more adventurous than my own. And it definitely didn’t involve gardening.

From dorms to apartments to hotel rooms to lock-offs in old women’s houses, there was rarely a garden and when there was, it wasn’t mine. As tempting as it is to blame where I lived on my lack of gardening, it’s actually when I lived there, which is to say briefly. Gardening is not a weekend makeover, no matter how much television would have me think so. Gardening is an investment, and if there’s one thing I was averse to whilst moving every 12-18 months, it was investments of any kind. 

“What if you just stayed?” Maybe it was 2017, when my therapist asked me what would happen if I stopped trying to start a brand new life every election cycle. She’d said what if it wasn’t cool that I moved so much, but instead a sign that I was simply running. Like most pointed insights, I found this implication infuriating. I knew immediately she was right. It was that year I started buying plants. 

But buying plants is different from planting them. A plant in a pot is mobile and its mobility can easily reflect your own. A garden is etched into the landscape, more of its place than we’ll ever be until we’re dead and buried. When we moved here, the original intention of the gardens was but a shadow. They had fallen into disrepair and weeds. We knew for at least the first year of living here, the gardens were meant for observing and learning. 

The east-facing side of the house (the one with the true front door), had four terraces held in place with visible stones and hidden metal scraps. Nearly every spare bit of ground had been overtaken by mountain mint or invasive dandelions. The mint had spread from its place in the garden to grow between every step all the way to the front door. When you walk into the house in the summer, you come in like a wave of minty freshness. The path to the front door still holds some of its pebble, but it too is overgrown. 

On the south-facing side of the house, our yard has about 1500 editable square feet, or for a better visual, you could plop about six cars onto it. At its best, it was full of wildflowers with a winding, circular path that encircled a tiny pond with a diameter no larger than 2.5 feet. That’s the local dog watering hole now. You can see a photo below. The pond is disgusting. The bench has fully rotted. The shed does not exist and will need to be built on a slope. Much of the path has been occupied by ant hills. 

For me, this image is less daunting when I consider just the framework. If we simplify things, it looks like this:

A silly little mock-up.

The promising thing about this depiction is the potential. We have a young aspen grove, several large shrubs and evergreens, and the outline of a great path. We also have access to a lot of free natural materials like stone and wood, plus this is southern-exposure — it gets a lot of sun. The biggest challenge is also, arguably, the simplest to fix: the weeds. There’s a fair amount of natural grasses in the front, making the weeding an early season focus as the dandelions sprout before everything else here. In addition to hours spent in the dirt, I’m using a narrow-focus, pet and wildlife safe vinegar-based weeding solution along the path. The path is stone and pebble, and digging out the weeds has proved nearly impossible. 

The gravel section where we access the septic will eventually be turned into a patio, and because of that, we’re not doing anything to beautify it now. The rotted out bench by the aspens similarly won’t be updated — simply no rush there. You can still sit on it, but it might be nice to extend the stonework over to it so you’re not wading through the grass to get to it.

Speaking of stonework, that’s partially how I’ve been spending my time this week. Let’s get into the east side. This is what it looked like when we moved in. 

Look, this is beautiful. I’m not arguing that. But it’s unruly and not very useful. Also, look at the mint. I could run a gum factory with that much mint. The nice thing about this side of the house is that it was a little easier to tackle. The existing terracing made things easy to approach and plan. Plus, we had help.

Ben’s cousin Jessica is a farmer in New Mexico. She’s in Hardiness Zone 5a, and we’re in Zone 4b. She’s familiar with the climate challenges here, and she did us the favor of doing the plant research for us. Last weekend she drove up from Taos with a car full of plants and topsoil, and we got to work.

She brought us edibles like thyme, oregano, and a variety of chives, as well as poppies, daisies, and a slew of other native grasses and flowers. We kept a great deal of the mint because we love it, and we dug around the existing succulents, daffodils, yarrow, and lamb’s ear. Then we planted our seeds.

I also added an additional project: stonework. I spent a couple hours one evening collecting stones from a debris pile, trucked them back to the house, and got to work.

I’m a stone mason now, OK?

I wanted to formalize the path we take to cross over to the street and the path we take to go around to the back of the house, so I laid the stone you see for both. If you’re looking closely, you can see this work is just beginning. I wanted to lay out a frame before I dug out the ground beneath. I need to settle the rocks into the dirt, and then do a little dirt fill around them to secure the stones in place. I’m enchanted with how it looks, and Cooper is ever grateful to have a path that’s not through the wet grass.

So much of this work in the moment is deeply satisfying. We also have everything around the path I built to dig up and rehabilitate. I’d like to add a bird bath, some logs and stone for critters to retreat into, and of course some flowers for the bees. We’ll save that for another day. I’d like to spend some time designing the space first.

Of course the real problem with gardening isn’t the weeding or the wondering, it’s the waiting. Four days of work later, and the garden looks like all we did was weedwack it.

This was never going to be an English garden. We didn’t want something tidy. We wanted a wild haven. But the step between hovel and haven isn’t the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, even if I can finally see the stones. And Jessica warned us: it would be nearly three weeks until we’d see anything from the seeds.

This is an exercise not only in patience, but in commitment. Jessica helped us build a garden that, for the most part, would return year on year — but weed mitigation has to happen every year. Clearing out the paths from the pernicious dandelions and mint shoots would be never-ending. This is an exercise not in beauty, but in tenacity. It’s an exercise in an identity that still feels new to me.

There’s a reason people say gardening is meditative: there is no getting rid of thoughts in meditation and there is no getting rid of weeds in gardening. You might see a little benefit that day, but the real benefits are over time. The real benefits come from investment.

I am settled in my space, into a space, more than I’ve ever been before. Everywhere else I lived before, my ability to change my environment was limited to quick fixes: pops of decor, a new plant, painting a cupboard. They were all low investment improvements. It would take no effort to change them again. But here, I can make all the changes I want, given the time and resources. That’s the thing though: I am shy on time and resources. Inherently change in this home has to take time, it has to take planning, and it has to take investment.

So I take pictures. I take those little fragments of time where change seemed so far away, and I hold them in pockets and folders until years later I can unfold them and see what commitment can do.