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| A clematis happier than it's companion rose. |
In my most recent garden – and I expect my last – I was saved from some mistakes because I was a renter before I became an owner. What I was willing and allowed to undertake was limited. A little tinkering with an existing bed was about it. When I approached my landlady with the desire to make an ambitious garden, she offered to sell me the house instead.
From the garden’s standpoint, I had the advantage of having spent several seasons just staring and imagining. An excellent practice if you have a few extra years. The design of the garden evolved slowly with the help of skilled artisans and practitioners, but that is the subject of another post. What is useful to know at this point is that over many years and several gardens I have established a few rules for myself, some honored and others honored only in the breach.
Rule 1: Respect your neighbors and the neighborhood. You will not have this to consider if you own a large property with no neighbors or are in the middle of a forest. But if you are in a village or on a block with sidewalks and neighbors, whatever you do should be compatible in style and feel with whatever is going on next door and down the block. You may not like it, but deal with it kindly. Don’t build walls and plant dense hedges. Try something soft and seamless; a mixed shrub border works well. Or arbors and trellises will soften something you wish to see less of, without obliterating your neighbor.
Be aware of the effect of your street-side planting, its relationship to the house, passersby, and the rest of the block. I am not happy with my work in this department, and instead of figuring out a good solution I am wandering around the neighborhood looking at front yards that are drearier than mine. Below is an example -– a very grand house surrounded on all side by gloomy, thorny, unkempt crabapples.
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| A screen planting helping neither the house nor the street. |
Rule 2: Take your time. Give careful thought not to what you want your garden to look like, but how you want to live in it. Do you want to have your morning coffee outside the kitchen door? Do you want to hide out in a corner of the garden where no one will find you? What do you want to see from your favorite vantage point? I have fought all comers to hold on to a particular view from the kitchen table, through a glass door and up into towering walnuts. All I want is more of the same – larger glass panes, thinner door frames, more to see.
Rule 3: You will be gardening in a hostile environment, no matter how benign it seems. Be prepared and stay strong. There will moles or voles, squirrels or rabbits, hail storms or droughts, endless rainfall or none, strange mold and fungus, leaf rollers, mysterious viruses, odd disappearances and occasional resurrections.
Rule 4: Try and hold on to something of the past, of the gardeners who have been there before you. Whether it’s the flowers they planted or the tools they used, save and continue to use and nurture what you can.
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| A forgotten, purely decorative well house. |
When I arrived on Livingston Street my neighbor Marian Faux already had a flower border on the narrow panel dividing our properties. Over these few years we doubled it and then doubled it again, pushing the margins of what will tolerate only partial sun and black walnuts. It has at last, in its fourth year, “come into its own.” By this I mean Marian and I have become more accepting of its limitations.
Rule 5: No matter how much you are prepared to spend, it will cost more.
Given all this, why do we even start a garden? Why do we persevere? Pick any summer day, and you will have your answer.
