I dropped a little chunk of change at the May Market this year and bought:
- two french tarragons
- one exotic-looking marigold I’ve since lost the tag for and therefore can’t name
- two strawberry bowls each containing 4 (fruiting!) plants
- one tiny lavender
- one summer savory
- one winter savory
- one rhubarb plant with three crowns
- one miss kim lilac
- one orange azalea
- one bag of azalea food
… and that’s on top of the 6 excellent heirloom tomato plants that Christine picked up for me in Blairsville last week.
The herbs will comforably go into my raised bed, and won’t turn their little noses up at the exceptionally poor soil therein; but I’m still not sure where I’m going to plant the tomatoes or the strawberries or the rhubarb. And I’m still debating about where exactly the lilac and the azalea will go in the front yard. I still have a butterfly bush I bought two summers ago sitting patiently in its pot by the front steps, waiting to go into the ground — but bless its weedy heart, it’s been thriving on my utter neglect.
My house has a fair amount of yard, but for whatever reason I’ve had a lot of trouble making use of it. I’d pretty much like to change everything, but where to begin? Soon after we moved in in 2005, I declared war on the ivy that was covering the south wall of our driveway, and began ripping it out. This ivy had apparently been planted at the same time the house was built in the early 1950s, and had long ago consumed pretty much any dirt that had been available behind the driveway wall — what had looked from the surface to be an ivy covering of a high bed turned out to be a very tall pile of ivy roots and a sprinkling of soil. Then, of course, removing the ivy exposed the fact that a large portion of the driveway wall had collapsed who only knows when — so naturally the plans of planting up the ivy bed had to be put on hold until the wall could be re-built.
The wall is still not re-built. The waste stone it was originally built with has been carefully sorted according to thickness and distributed in piles that are still occupying our garage. With the totally humbling help of my dear friend Bob we got the first three or four courses laid before the nightmarishness of building with waste stone totally kicked our asses and we basically gave up. I persist in believing I’m going to just rebuild the fucker at some point soon, but the thing is, when?
Meanwhile, of course, the denuded bank has become a big forest of weeds — I can’t plant it up properly without a wall to hold it together, and the ivy has been ground into little bits for mulch, so basically the jewel weed, thistles, dandelions and switchgrass have been having free rein for two years. I feel so sorry for my kind and patient neighbors, I really do. If I were them I’d have called the authorities on me long ago. Remind me sometime to tell you the sad sorry saga of the Dirt, the remnants of which are still choking the north wall of the driveway, choking out the grape hyacinth that had naturalized there.
And then there’s the question of what to do with the hedge. I hate the hedge, I wish it gone — but I’ve learned from the ivy experience that I had better do my homework before I go ripping it out without a good thing to put in its place. Two years ago I ripped out one hedge plant to allow a volunteer maple sapling that had clearly rooted there many years ago to finally grow, and now I have a maple sapling about ten feet high interrupting the hedgeline along the driveway. What next? I want the lilac (and hopefully future lilac friends) to border the sidewalk, I think. And the butterfly bush.
The biggest obstacle to planting up a garden is the lawn, I think. Lawn saps the imagination as well as the energy/motivation required to get out there and plant things. It’s a big blank canvas, basically, but one in which changing even a square inch requires cutting through turf that hasn’t been disturbed since the house was first built. And the soil that’s under all that grass is, I’m guessing, really not great. And part of me is anxious about disturbing the surface of any part of my rear yard, lest I hasten the day when the hillside collapses and takes half our house with it. Let’s hear it for the Pennsylvania red beds and our tragically eroding hillside!
Regardless, though, I’m resolved to get these plants into the ground at some point this week, and am hoping Zen cooperates by letting me get some yard work done.