Getting Ready For The Tour

It seems I have become the unofficial gardener of the official Haywood County Master Gardener Tour. Another garden I help tend will be on the tour this year.

This year's tour will be on Saturday, June 18th. I'm getting the garden ready now with a fresh layer of mulch while the rather extensive perennial flower beds are still asleep. I had a full dump truck load delivered. I have been spreading mulch in between rain and snow and rain ever since.

This is just the back yard of this particular garden. Over the last two years there has been a fair amount of loss to the lawn area as bed creep has taken hold to add more shrubs and flowers. I am a bit of an enabler.

This year's tour will have a monarch way station, an orchard and apiary, the whimsical perennial garden I tend and the Giving Garden at the Canton branch of the public library. There may be more. I'm not sure.

You wouldn't know it from seeing my garden, but I do know how to tend a proper garden. I just don't have a proper garden. I have a wild cultivated garden.

Where a new crocus has arisen from the leaf litter and chop and drop. That is called mulch in my garden.

Snowdrops push up through my leaf litter mulch as the wild things begin to stir.

In my garden civilized is hard to come by.

Mowed paths and the Great Lawn are the negative space that add a touch of order to the wild. That is marred at the moment by a ring of crocus coming up in the Great Lawn. I also ignore the fact that my lawn isn't so much grass as what ever can stand regular weed whacking. I don't even own a lawn mower.

I don't even rake my lawn. That would be futile considering it is surrounded by deciduous forest and subject to wicked winds all winter long. I'll settle for the crocus mixing with the wild mowed things and dappled with leaves.