Piece By Piece

I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.  I don’t have any grand plans.  I don’t even have simple plans.  Every Saturday morning I trudge out to the shed, pull out the lawn mower and get started mowing.  It seems like it takes all day.  It really takes about 90 minutes.  But the chore of mowing the lawn is taking up too much of my mental time.  By the time I am finished I feel a little bit defeated and quite a bit overwhelmed.  I don’t know where to start.  What can I do to make this easier?  What can I do to transform this place into the Eden I found so easy to imagine when we first toured this house a few months ago? 

My new back yard is very nearly a green blank slate.

My wife has been encouraging me to hire someone to mow the lawn – at least for the summer so I can focus on the things I enjoy like planting trees, putting in pathways, and creating borders.  But I have resisted out of stubbornness.  I tell myself “I don’t want to pay someone to do what I can do for free.”  And yet I don’t think twice about paying to have someone change the oil in my car.  Surely, if I was going to have to surrender my man card for paying someone to mow my own lawn the Man card Defense Authority Department (McDAD) would have already taken it away for not changing my own oil filter, right? 

I have also resisted hiring someone to mow my lawn because part of me begrudgingly knows that this sort of angst is a necessary part of my assimilation with the new house.  This is part of the “just live with it for awhile” strategy that I know to be good advice.  It’s just that it has been harder and more discouraging than I imagined it would be.  I have missed the satisfaction that comes with creating a new bed.  I have missed the creative spark that flares up when you finally think of the perfect plant for the perfect spot.  I have missed that simple feeling of accomplishment when you stand back and realize that you have successfully addressed a problem.  But every week that I spend walking back and forth through the yard I sense that I am learning something valuable even if I can’t quite take that knowledge and transform it into a bigger picture.

This weekend I really started to sense a change though.  While I mowed the lawn, I noticed that one section of the yard was really dry in spite of being in deep shade and in spite of having given the impression of perpetual wetness earlier this spring.  I noticed that a different section of yard that was especially uneven and promised at least one gruesome ankle injury if the issue doesn’t get addressed. 

I started filling holes and discovered
many more in the process.

Though I was silently complaining to myself about the size of the lawn, the time I spent out there afforded me the luxury of day-dreaming about the summer ahead.  It occurred to me that this yard is big enough that I wouldn’t feel conflicted about filling up my daughter’s pool and just letting it sit there for a couple days.  The grass beneath it could die and it wouldn’t be a huge eyesore like it would have been in the smallness of our former yard.  As I struggled to maneuver the mower as close to the shed as I could, I had a quick vision of a small bed of flowers surrounding the shed with a trellis of sweet peas in the middle.

I think I'll remove the ornamental pear tree planted so closely to the shed and put in some kind of flower bed.

I could imagine a fall day, years from now, sitting around a stone fireplace with friends and kids while the dark came on us. I imagined friends sharing spiked hot chocolate or mulled wine while the autumn colors of trees I have yet to plant cast a quiet spell upon us.  

I found this picture on Houzz and I would love to mimic this some day.
(Traditional Patio by Portland Landscape Architect beautiful bones and purple stones)

Another view from a different angle.
(Traditional Patio by Portland Landscape Architect beautiful bones and purple stones)

I don’t know which of these things will come to pass.  Maybe I will have a different vision at some point that will inspire me to go in another direction.  But the encouraging thing is that I am starting to believe that I will, eventually, make this work.  This will become a place I can handle or at least a place that I will enjoy trying to handle. 

Living with it for a while is still going to take a while.  But piece by piece I am putting this puzzle together and it’s starting to feel okay that I’m doing it all without the picture on the box to guide me. 

Boston

From April through October (hopefully) I have the Boston Red Sox games on the TV when I'm not out in the yard.  I became afflicted with loving the Red Sox when I was a child through what now seems like a fluke, a random twist of fate.

Boston is a city that reflects its history
and progress at the same time.

My grandmother bought me a bat for my birthday and on the barrel of that bat was a copy of the Red Sox's left fielder's signature, Jim Rice.  I used to take that bat up to the plate with me in our backyard baseball games and I was, on those endless summer days, Jim Rice in a little boy's body.

I loved the Red Sox the way only a boy can love something.  With my whole heart, with hope, with expectation.  And for years the Red Sox found new ways to disappoint me.  

But that all changed in 2004 when they finally broke the curse of the Bambino and won a World Series.  Years of bitterness, heartache, and feeling like life was unfair had been washed away for me and for millions of Red Sox fans like me.  The last 10 years or so have been great for New England sports fans.  Just yesterday the Red Sox continued their surprisingly good start to this baseball season with a walk-off hit.  Fans left Fenway Park in a great mood.  Meanwhile, the rest of the city was celebrating Patriot's Day and the running of the Boston marathon.  It was a joyous day. For a while.  

I have never lived in Boston.  I don't have family there either.  But I do have friends there.  I have vacationed there.  I have raised a mug of beer with strangers there.  I have high-fived eight-year-old kids and octogenarians there.  I have walked the Freedom Trail, watched the boats out in the Bay, and touched the dirt of the warning track in Fenway Park.  Without forgetting the tragedy that happened yesterday, these are the things about Boston that I will choose to remember.  The people of that quintessential American city are in my thoughts and prayers.  May they find peace and comfort in these dark times.

These are some of the pictures I took while vacationing in Boston in September of 2012.   

There are gardens everywhere in the city.  Unfortunately, most of my pictures were taken at night.

This front entrance was regal.

This door in an alleyway captured my imagination.

Mecca for a Red Sox fan - on top of the Green Monster in left field.

Singing of the national anthem.  God bless America and God bless Boston.

Just Live With It

I’ve been overwhelmed with tasks.  We have moved in to our new place and unpacked most of our boxes.  We’re still in the process of remodeling the 69-year-old kitchen so there is still a sense of disarray in our household.  But we’re getting “there” even though we don’t quite know where exactly “there” is or what it will feel like when we settle there.

With some of the more pressing issues taken care of I am slowly turning my attention to the yard.  But the yard is larger than I’m used to and I don’t know where to start.  I haven’t been here long enough to discover all the things that make this yard unique so I'm reluctant to commit to anything.  For instance, our recent rains revealed that there are a few places close to our patio where the water does not drain.  At all.  I had already considered putting in some kind of rock pathway beginning right where the water puddles so that idea might have “gone down the drain” . . . unlike the water.    

The best advice I’ve ever received about garden design was in Julie Moir Messervy’s “The Inward Garden.”  I’m loosely paraphrasing here, but she said that a gardener should just live with their garden for a while.  That advice has been on my mind lately as I’ve been eager to tackle new projects.  I keep telling myself to be patient and let the ideas come to me as I spend time working in the yard, as I get familiar with the sunlight, as I live through the seasons and experience the patterns of nature here. 

But I don’t think Messervy was trying to say “do nothing” either.  So I am keeping up on tasks like mowing the lawn (which I really don’t enjoy doing), and picking from the abundance of weeds.  I have also set up my compost bins and planted three dwarf Japanese maples that I brought over from our old house. 

Last night, however, I had a spare hour-and-a-half after work so I decided to tackle a small project.  At some point, along this trellised fence that marks the divide between my property and the elderly lady’s next door, there was a flower bed.  I imagine it must have looked beautiful in the spring several years ago.  But now the only word that comes to mind is “dilapidated”.  The lattice work needs to be repaired.  The weedy grass needs to be pulled.  Irrigation needs to be addressed. 

From the look of it, I thought the house next door was empty when we bought this house.  It is not.

I started by pulling out handfuls of grass and discovered that buried within the grass were various types of edging materials – bricks and red cement edgers.  I have no formal training in archaeology, but I’m pretty sure that these buried materials were placed right against the base of the fence to prevent the overgrown grass and weeds from coming in from the other side of the fence.  

I dislike this type of edging.  I dislike it a lot.  

I assume that the elderly lady (whom I have yet to even see) no longer cares about gardening or keeping her exterior in tip-top shape.  I may help her with this in small ways if I can but I don’t want to assume that my help would be welcomed until I’ve met her.  I’m not a fan of using weed blocking fabrics, but this might actually be a perfect place for using it. 

After the grass was mostly pulled out I was able to get a better look at the irrigation pipe that so prominently stands out in this small bed.  I could definitely take this down to ground level and still have access to water here but for now I think I will just add a Y valve and attach a drip irrigation timer to it and leave the other valve open for attaching a hose. 

Irrigation is always a first concern when planting here since we very rarely get rain between May and October.

This weekend I’ll try to repair or replace the lattice work and install the weed fabric.  I will pull out the grass roots that I missed.  I will use the weed whacker to trim the edges.  I might even plant a few Moon Flower seeds that I harvested unless I simply can’t escape the siren’s call of my favorite nursery and need to take the plunge and buy something that is already green.  And then I’ll live with it for a while.