A Garden In The Wilderness

This will be my last personal garden. It is my intention to stay for the duration. I've made it to higher ground and I am staying put. That means sort of considering my eventual decrepitude and thinking long term.

My challenge from the beginning was in creating a garden that fit in, that belonged to the wilderness that it is surrounded by and very much a part of. A manicured suburban landscape simply wasn't going to work here, not for me anyway.

The garden's site had other things to consider. The two big ones were the utility easement with the power line running straight through the middle of it all where no trees are allowed period at risk of traumatic intervention and the other is the septic drain field tucked into the forest where planting more trees would not be advisable.

I know what the wilderness wants to do and I don't want to spend the rest of my life fighting it at every turn. It makes far more sense for me to co-opt nature's energy into the very essence of the garden.

When I do that, when I let nature have a big say in what gets planted, I end up with sweeping drifts of White Snakeroot, Ageratina altissima in the shade of the forest.

The garden site I had was a sunny opening surrounded on all sides by the forest. The opening had to remain open and I most certainly wasn't going to be chopping down the forest. That gave me two habitats to work with, the shaded forest and an open sunny meadow at the forest edge.

There are some advantages here. The garden is located in one of the most biologically diverse areas of the country and the native flora is rich in garden worthy plants. The two gardeners already on this land had been adding to that diversity for a couple of decades. I was blessed with excellent raw materials for garden making, many of which were already growing on site.

Step number one in garden making is most often destruction. For me that meant removing the unwanted to clear space for planting. The forest was thinned of crowded and poorly shape saplings, dead fall and finally some large locust trees. The unwanted thug plant species like blackberry, elderberry, clematis and New England aster were cut and pulled at every chance. A new garden is coming.

Step two, the planting part, goes better when there is a budget dedicated to it. I didn't have one. In the slow accumulation of the wanted, I noticed nature was filling in all the space that had been opened up. A lot of what was showing up were very desirable wild flowers.

I planted, weeded around my new plantings, kept editing out the unwanted and leaving the better offerings.

It starts like this.

Yes there are tomatoes growing in there with all those sunflowers and ironweed. The roadside vegetable garden is a good example of how things work around here.

I planted sunflowers once. Now they are self sowing annuals. The ironweed sprouted in the garden last year and I didn't have the heart to edit it out. This year it is six feet tall and in glorious bloom. It has to go though. I'll collect the seed when they are done and spread it further afield. The plants will have to be dug out. This is the vegetable garden. Competition will be limited to a select few.

I love my grasses. They are very much a part of a meadow ecology. There were grasses here. Only two had any character that I liked and none could stand shoulder to shoulder with the tall flower meadow.

I changed that by adding bigger grasses. From a garden design standpoint they added a bold new texture and an element that could be repeated throughout to start making a cohesive whole from such a large and varied space. And the grasses would never draw the unwanted attention of the utility company.

The grasses also stand through the winter adding much needed winter interest to the barren deciduous forest where the thinning carcasses of the herbaceous perennials get pressed closer to the ground with each snowfall.

It fits in. A highly colored, edited and embellished collection of wild that hides the winter under garden waiting below.