The Garden King

A garden has this advantage, that it makes it indifferent where you live. A well-laid garden makes the face of the country of no account; let that be low or high, grand or mean, you have made a beautiful abode worthy of man. -Emerson


IT"S Spring again, and, in proper fashion for this weekend I've abandoned my dedication to (obsession with) devouring and meddling in politics and world events to tending my woodland garden in the back of my house and the patch in front that I gradually substituted for my once perfect lawn. It's all perennials, bushes and trees throughout - except for the tomatoes we defiantly grow in front to thumb our noses at the community regulation against 'vegetables' in the front yard.

I put the majority of the hundreds of different plants in myself in the decade or so I've lived here. There was another garden head living in this 30-plus year-old house before me (another before that one), and there are always bulbs popping up in odd places where the ivy I dug up by hand with my aged dad I'd move in with used to thrive and dominate the yard. Hundreds of plants perished under my inexperienced watch, in the beginning, and many more have been lost to the weather, insects, or trampled underneath my size-13 foot. Some just fade away without explanation . . .

I remind myself that all plants have a life cycle, like everything else in this world. They grow and eventually die. I recall the oaks and other trees which produce more acorns and seeds in a desperate attempt to propagate as they falter and fade away. In my garden, it's easy to imagine that my hand in the mostly successful planting, propagating, and preserving of the life of the plants, bushes and trees in my garden makes me some praiseworthy servant of nature in the parental role I've assumed over my flora and the fauna which has adopted my yard as its refuge and home. I'm as careful as I can be to avoid any chemicals or any other agents of harm to the wildlife which passes through my garden all day and night. Nature is at ease around me, as I am at ease with it.

You can see my hand in every foot of space where I've pushed the roots of the aged trees aside to make room for the plants, trees, and bushes from our local garden centers (many gone now) that I greedily piled into the back of my pickup truck several times a week and self-consciously unloaded in the driveway. I've unloaded truckloads of dirt, sand, and gravel to conquer the clay and roots surrounding the small woods and give foundation to the plants which would find just enough sun through the canopy to persist and naturalize. But, aside from the ivy, the bulbs and some neon garden phlox, the garden is there at my own insistence, direction, and effort.





I'm certainly responsible for the plants that I've selfishly adopted for my yard. Certainly, they wouldn't have willing come to me on their own, if they were able. It is part of my own human obsession to have them close to me - to nurture and watch them grow and propagate - that is the dominate reason they are here. Some parent back where they originated, assigned to that task by none other than nature herself, produced the seed or cutting (or sacrificed their very domain) to enable me to collect and hold them here in front of me, in my own space. Yet, in my arrogance and need to have their beauty and magnificence gracing my pedestrian existence, I'm an accomplice in the opportunistic abduction.

Here in my garden, I am the ward, counselor, referee, doctor, nurse, protector, defender and companion. The plant life wraps around me as I walk through as if it knows me and I speak to it aloud and to myself as I separate one from the other, judiciously clip back eager branches to afford lesser ones' more sunlight, arbitrarily pluck weeds and crush tiny insects between my veteran fingers, and caresses me as I dig up and replant the baby 'volunteers' where I envision them thriving and fostering their own family someday. I don't actually speak their language, although I imagine I do. I also imagine the plants, bushes, and trees understand me and appreciate all I've done for them in bringing them here and manipulating them to stay and grow wherever I decide. They're saying all of the best things about my caretaking that I can imagine they would, or could, if they could talk. How magnificent they all look as I've arranged them and prodded them to grow and persist in their new home. How splendid I look in among them in my earthoned-toned garden-wear.

Truth is, in my garden I'm just a benevolent dictator, at best. I'm very typical in my American posture of superiority, as if all of these couldn't exist or sustain themselves outside of my docent influence and care. But, with every branch mistakenly broken in my clumsy hands, or with every innocent 'volunteer' trampled or plucked, it's clear that I'm mainly managing my own meddling harm in bring them here in the first place. I'll continue, though (out of the sheer momentum of the instigation of life I've encouraged in my garden), to assume my dominate role and manipulate all of them to their inevitable end. It definitely deserves the time and attention I've taken away from the effects and consequences of our nation's cares and ambitions to help remake my little abode in the image nature intended for someplace else in the world. Worthy of a man. Typical of an American.

. . . it's all shade in my back yard. It would just be a meal for the critters, anyway. :)

Good luck with the garden!

Nice!

K&R

. . . I got it from a flower shop for a couple of bucks when it's flowers died. The stem is thread thin and it sports just a few small leaves, but the flowers grow into that passion flower-like blossom. I've got them growing up my bayberry bush (think old spice).

:thumbsup:

lots of veggies and flowers to plant. I have pot after pot to put out each day because its too cold yet to plant anything. WAAAAAAAAAAAAA! I WANT WARM WEATHER FOR THE GROUND!

I have six pots of huge marigolds, yellow, light yellow and vanilla. I have dozens of little plants, three pedestals filled with osaka red and pink and white cabbages, violas out the wazoo -plant them and they will come back and they will seed all over the place. they are so lovely, tiny and heroic!- I have tomatoes waiting to go, lettuce, beans, cabbage and the like to plant. SNIFFLE! I hate waiting.

I have lavender in pots by my door because of the fragrance, white alyssums that bloom with blossoms all summer and give off a HUGE honey fragrance. My clementis has flower spikes coming out of it. I love gardens and I love garden threads! Thank you!

. . . about 10 years of wonderful labor.

tell me what are your favourite plants I can see you have many. I am ten years into my woodland garden and each year I discover something new that I wish to have, a few years ago it was hellebores and every year I look forward to this time and watching to see what has survived.

I haven't tried hellebores yet, but they do look intriguing. I'll tell you what I like in the woods: whatever grows. But, I do have a couple of winners, like the woodland poppies which bloom early in the season. I have some great oakleaf hydrangeas which made it to about six feet. Another winner is the doublefile viburnum with it's 7 foot spread of branches adorned with white lacecaps. I also have a jelena witchhazel which blooms in mid-January with a profusion of bright orange tassels against the snow. I have a rosebay rhododendron which has beautiful white flowers, but hasn't come close to the 18 feet promised. Another effortless favorite in the woods is the kerria with its slender green branches and a rush of yellow petaled flowers right after the forsythia blooms.

I'll be on the lookout for hellebores in the future :hi:

I move them to England. I also have an oak leaf hydrangea after 10 years it is almost 4 feet maybe someday it will reach 6. I am curious about your woodland poppies what colour are they? I have to say gardening is the one thing in life that I find both satisfying and intriguing, one never knows what surprises the future holds beneath the soil.

thank you for posting this.

I started collecting a few hostas several years ago, now I can't seem to stop buying them. Collecting plants can become an obsession, but a good obsession.:hi:

Great post and beautiful pictures. If I knew how, I would post pictures from my own Garden which, this year, is in its 40th year of being raised organically by me. It is so self-regulating and healthy that the biggest pests I face are armadillos that come in to dig for fat earth-worms. (None of my neighbors have even seen any armadillos, since we are in northern middle Tennessee. However, my dogs have dispatched five in the past month.)

The best I can do is to get some kid to mow the lawn occasionally. That keeps the grass down and keeps the snake population down. That's all the "gardening" I can do. The only thing that grows on my front step is poison ivy, and I didn't know that's what it was until I got tertiary infection from it. (It was on my shoe, I took my shoe off with my hand, and I wound up scratching my shoulder. Wound up transferring the damn poison oil all over.)

Maybe you can romanticize it a lot, but nature hates us and is doing everything it can to kill us. Go watch The Happening and get a clue.

But, instead of looking at it as a threat, I prefer to recognize the urgent task of regenerating life from the materials at hand and all of the work and effort nature puts in to perpetuate all of that. I don't take it personally that there is something larger than myself which has designs of the very product of my being to feed its insatiable instinct to exist.

I still believe that man (collectively) is the most destructive element on the planet. It's all we can do to slow down the rate of our destruction so that we can contribute to nature's devouring task without completely sacrificing ourselves to that cycle of life. The ability to romance is the most redeeming part of the gift of our imagination: To touch, to feel, to love helps us appreciate this gift of life and compels us to share, build, and nurture; even as we inevitably tear down and destroy in our anxious (sometimes desperate) drive to survive.

Absolutely beautiful! I love it.

Thanks for sharng this. It is so important for people to be in touch with the green world.

Nominated, of course.

and inspired.

You have a real way with words!

Bravo!


My mother's always lamenting her shady garden's lack of variety ("I'm sick of impatiens!"), but it looks like you have quite a lot of different things going on.


I am a novice gardener and am blessed with all-day sunshine in the front of the house, so I am growing herbs, veggies and a few flowers in containers on the steps:





(Please excuse the desperate-to-be-mowed grass.)

But I do think they are beautiful and certainly, in the case of vegetable gardens, a boon to our mental and physical health. Nice work, bigtree, the pictures of your garden are inspiring.

My problem is that my wife is a gardener while I am a lover of the forest. Our home, in an oak and hickory grove on a hilltop, is a sanctuary from the urban sprawl around us. We found this spot almost fifteen years ago and she has been relentlessly (probably the wrong term) gardening her way around the house ever since. Adjacent to the house lot is a two-acre hillside forest of mixed pines and a few hardwoods that has been untended for years--just the way I and the deer and racoons and owls and the fox and other critters love it. Unfortunately, to my wife, the forest is not so much a forest as it is an underutilized, potential garden space. So now, despite my pleas, she is carving out trails and "cleaning it up so we don't have to worry about getting devoured by ticks".

I feel like I'm fighting the oldest battle in history: the encroachment of civilization on the wild. Gardens are beautiful, but so are undisturbed forests. Can't we just all get along?

I wish I could get that into a hobby! The only thing I can grow is moss or mold.

It makes you think that you are in control and that you are the dictator in charge...but the truth is that those plants have tricked you into propagating and caring for them with their beauty or smell or usefulness.
We humans are so naive.

It brings such peach and joy.

Southern California brag: We ate three tomatoes (two gold cherry tomatoes and one red regular tomato) yesterday and two golden cherry tomatoes last week. Also, I have a tomato plant that spontaneously grew out of my compost. I planted it in a sunny spot in the latter part of last summer. It not only made it through the winter, but it has about three tomatoes on it. I'm curious to know what they are.

I can garden in pots some during the summer but due to the drought, I mostly plant drought-resistance decorative plants and do vegetable gardening in the winter.

I love it. Your garden is an inspiration, The Garden King. Thanks for posting this.

You know sometimes, there is just too much that the world deals out to us. And while we should and must pay attention to it all, there comes a time, when we need a reprieve, when we need to back off and reconnect to the beauty of nature in this world, and I thank you so much for reminding me/us of this.

There have been several times in my life, when the outside no longer works for me, and I have retreated for a spell, into my garden. There, I have rebuilt by body, through shovel and wheelbarrel, and rebuilt my spirit from the seeds I have sown, rejoicing in the gift of life as they have emerged, by some miraculous wonder, and have slipped out early morn to see the bud the day before bloom today.

This is renewal. This is connecting with beyond the trivalities of man.

Thank you sir, for sharing your beautiful garden, indicative of your beautiful spirit here on earth.

Thank you.

I plan on getting out there tomorrow....because of you!

than sitting with a book among the flowers.

Thank you for saying it better than I ever could.