How A Garden Grows

The official drought better be over. The current monsoon has created a dense lushness. The trees look fuller. The wild under growth part of the wild cultivated garden is extra robust. The editing process is an ongoing ritual.

In the long run though, scenes like this are part luck and big heaping of deliberate patience.



The preference for my own baby garden is to spend a lot less time editing. The forest and its smaller inhabitants are a mighty foe. They assert their dominance. Also my baby garden is not starting from a place of suburban bulldozed subdivisions with a blank slate. The forest is here. It must be lived with.

I was very happy to see when I returned home my editing weapon of choice. A full load of fresh wood chips had been dumped on my driveway. Let the smothering mulch be spread.



After a long weekend touring fabulous gardens in Chicago, the one place here giving me a great degree of satisfaction was the vegetable garden. Looking around at the ornamental parts of the garden caused a sense of dread. It is going to take a lot of work to make a fabulous garden in the wild forest.



The vegetables had grown in the week I was gone. That was nice. At least those that hadn't been eaten by the slugs and the grasshopper plague. What was really giving me that sense of satisfaction though was the order and feeling of control I found in the vegetable garden. It is a garden I am in charge of, not the wild forest.

The wood chip mulch is what allows me to shift the balance of power.



There has even been another expansion in the vegetable garden. The next section east was sprayed a couple of weeks ago to kill what was growing there for a strawberry patch next spring. The decomposition of the wood chips between now and then should make for a nice planting soil come spring. If I can wait that long. Maybe I'll need more corn or potatoes and can borrow this space for the summer.



As I wander the wild cultivated garden there is no shortage of plants I see that would be perfectly at home in a more civilized place. A large drift of this native Goat's Beard, Aruncus dioicus would be fabulous.



This un-named, unknown, slightly buried shrub rose is different. Maybe I'll weed around it, mulch it and visit it where it lives. I don't really want a lot of roses in the civilized garden.



Sort of civilized anyway. I have the beginnings of my salvia for a huge swath that can flow down the hillside in a more naturalistic planting design like I just saw at the Lurie Garden in Chicago. That is pretty much what I already had in mind.



The thing is with the wood chip mulch I will have a much better chance of deciding who will be living on my hillside. The editing will be reduced by as much as 90%. I am seeing in my older mulched beds that some of the wild things will germinate on top as the mulch ages. Still, it seems to be restricted at this point to only a few species, far fewer than the whole gang of wild things that are possible.



The wood chip mulch can be refreshed over time. I just need to place a standing order with the tree trimmers that when they are in the area and need to dump a load of chips, I'm their man. In Hawaii I'd pay $85 bucks for a full load of chips. Here they are free.



So I can keep planting things like my first ever Japanese Maple in the baby garden that will be modestly civilized and mulch things when I have the chips.

I need an edge in this forest garden or I could spend my entire waking life weeding.



Sometimes I just want to wander around with the Spots taking pictures and enjoying things.