Imagination

Tomorrow is Garden Bloggers Bloom Day and I got nothin. I have seen a lone Iberis sempervirens, Evergreen Candytuft with a minuscule flower head blooming in the gravel driveway at the resident gardeners house and of course there is a Blue Aster that must have been frozen in time. Why I just noticed it today is a mystery since it is right by the front steps.

Instead of flowers opening, I have the ground beneath my cabin opening up into the new basement patio. I'm in the far back corner now, the last bit of the slope to get cut before I start on the actual trench digging for the footing for another wall.














I could go scour the mountain and look for some tiny speck of a bloom on something, but I am currently obsessed. With Digging.

For now I will be content with the view from beneath my cabin and continue to study the shape of the land and the change of the seasons. This bare brown really isn't so bad, it has its own charm, but I sure feel exposed when the cars drive by on the highway. A couple of them have driven by very very slowly. I know they are looking.














At my gorgeous new wall and the expanding basement patio.

I can imagine when this space is surrounded by green again. I know I will leave a couple of small planting holes in the patio floor with a few large sculptural boulders. Where just yet I'm not sure. I'm being a bad designer and making it up as I go along.














In the dead of winter though my wall will bloom and be a major element in the garden. Only a couple of months ago it was just in my imagination.


For Charlotte aka Wellspring a thousand words or so.

A dry stacked stone wall three feet eight inches tall and thirty five feet long curves gently. The stones are rough and come in many sizes and different colors. There are white stones, reddish stones, dark brown and white ones with flecks of black. Despite their irregularity, in the stacking they present a flat front and an almost level top. Some fine tuning along the top is still needed.

This stone wall is fifteen feet up from the bottom of a small valley on a much more expansive steep grassy slope. The larger slope makes the wall look much smaller by comparison. One side of the valley wall is grass. The other side of the valley is the leafless deciduous forest in winter. Through this valley runs an open cut in the forest canopy and the tail end of the electric utility lines.

Rising above the dry stacked stone wall and running parallel to it is the beginning construction of a small cabin. The cabin itself measures only fourteen feet wide by twenty seven feet long. The floor structure is built and several sections of wall framing have been built and are laying flat on the floor. The cabin too is perched on the top edge of the expansive steep grassy slope of the utility valley.

Holding the floor of the cabin up on the downhill side of the slope just above the dry stacked stone wall are five round grey cement columns with a stucco texture. These five columns are nine feet back from the stone wall. Behind the columns and under the cabin is a bare hillside of orange colored dirt. A cut creating a flat wall of bare dirt is being made six feet behind the round grey cement columns.

In between the dry stacked stone wall and the flat wall of bare dirt under the cabin is a level floor of soil. This is the patio floor. The five round cement columns run nearly in the center the length of the patio floor. The columns are spaced six feet apart. On one side of the columns the patio is under the cabin. On the other side of the columns the patio is in the open air.

On both sides of the dry stacked stone wall huge boulders have been placed into the grassy hillside to act as steps, landings and transitions back into the natural slope. One day paths will lead into the gardens from these exits off the patio.

Looking again at the cabin, the dry stacked stone wall and the level patio area underneath and between them from the bottom of the sunny utility valley, on the right at the top of the grassy slope is the gravel driveway that comes down the ridgeline to the cabin and a pad that has been flattened out for the building of a future small house. The forest rises directly behind the gravel driveway and surrounds the pad for the future house. On the left of the cabin about ten feet from the stoop for the back door the forest also begins again as the ridge line moves out and away from the utility easement the cuts its swath through the forest.

Sitting on the basement patio I will be looking out and over the open space of the utility valley and what will be my future full sun gardens in a mostly shaded forest setting. It faces south west and will get sun for much of the year depending on the weather. It certainly rains here much more than the desert of leeward Maui and the fog rolls through these mountains and lingers on a regular basis. The basement patio will have sun and shade, open air and a roof and I will learn which spots are best for what conditions and what time of the year.

When I am done working for the day my feet will lead me along the garden paths back to the basement patio where I can relax and look out over the splendors thriving on a hillside that used to be grass.