My Garden

Every garden needs a place to work, to stack pots and bags of fertilizer (organic please, you will see a difference) and yet most gardens - even those designed by the pros - are missing just that. Or it is sooooo ugly! This is the business end of my garden, a long walkway between the house and a retaining wall - the only thing that's keeping the garden from invading the kitchen.

I try things out here, and if they are beautiful or fragrant or tug at my heart, I will find places for them in the garden.

The long bare wall is covered with Boston ivy - from one 1 gallon pot I planted seven years ago. It has grown around the corner and covers one garage, it is creeping slowly across the shady back side of the house too. It roots occasionally where it touches the ground, but it does not invade the path like clematis and morning glory and other vines that throw their arms out. It is actually quite well behaved.

It was eating the chimney so I topped it and pulled off the fat stems trying to catch the smoke. It doesn't seem to be able to make the u-turn under the eaves and crawl out onto the roof - good news there. I have to cut it off the tops of the downspouts once a year to keep it off the roof. It clings by tiny suckers like a tree frog, and it does not damage the stucco. Don't plant it on a wood house, it will damage that. But here it cloaks a bare wall, gives shelter to the finches and warblers, and makes the business end of the garden more beautiful.

There is a birdbath in this garden too, surrounded by white impatiens, a hosta the snails have not yet discovered and devoured, some heucheras and the fabulous Japanese forest grass, Hakonechloa  'All Gold'. I love it for the way it livens up the shade, for its punctuation marks. I have planted a lot of this in the shady spots in the rest of the garden, and I'm worried I may have overdone it. Oh well. That's gardening.

There is also a fabulous sculpture by the artist Marcia Donohue. Her garden is amazing and open some Sundays. Outside my kitchen window, this is the first thing I see as I am filling the tea kettle and feeding the birds, and the last thing I see as I turn off the lights and head for bed.

 

Some Campanula porscharskyana (no I don't make these names up and yes I agree some of them are quite silly) has decided to climb into the privet hedge and around the corner. The blue and white pot used to have goldfish, but in a bowl that size it was a sushi bar for the raccoons. So now the bowl is empty. The raccoons will have to find their own food, and clean up their own messes.

 And when I turned over a loose step to see if I could fix it, I found a teeny friend. 

You can see how small he is by comparing him to his friend Jiminy Cricket. I hope he grows up and develops a taste for gophers.