Starting Over

Life is full of twists and turns, so there are lots of times we need to start over in one way or another. There are eras to life – chapters to open and close. And no matter what chapter has been opening for me, I’ve always brought along one thing – my gardens.

Everywhere I’ve lived, my green thumb has begun throbbing and begging me to recreate the outdoor space I’ve been assigned. I can’t help it. I love landscaping and plants, so it just comes naturally to me. Making art with plants is fun. A garden is a living artwork that changes through the seasons, and it’s easily adjusted if one doesn’t like the results of their first attempt. Or second. Or third. It’s a canvas where one can just play all the time, a canvas where nothing is permanent.

Even at my first big city apartment in a concrete jungle I found a way to sneak in some annual flowers around our tiny cement patio to brighten things up a bit. Our first little house in Del City, Oklahoma was just a tiny thing sitting on a little square of Zoysia grass with literally no plants, trees, or shrubs around the place. By the time we left it had a beautiful hedge, front garden, and a massive vegetable garden out back. Our second place in Des Moines. Iowa was a small fairytale-like cottage with unmanaged trees and shrubs and too much backyard cement. By the time we left, there were annual and perennial gardens all around the house, a vegetable garden, a terraced garden off the driveway, a water garden, and a finch aviary beside the garage. Our next place, in Grinnell, was way out in the countryside. Twenty-seven acres of old oaks, second growth woods, hills, ponds, and pastures. Here I removed all the fencing, built another pond, managed the woods, converted the pastures to native prairie grasses and forbs, did prairie burns, built a new house and donated the old house; and created terraced gardens, water gardens, and vegetable gardens. Specimen trees and native trees were added here and there. It was a sanctuary for us and for wildlife and plants. I could have spent a lifetime there – it was my ideal place.

My next place was in town. A historic 108-year-old craftsman style stucco house on a tiny corner lot. Here I made a new type of garden, a fenced English-style back garden blending a combination of formal plantings and native woodland plants. Once again I had a water garden, this time with tropical fish. The barren front lawn became a gorgeous array of trees, shrubs, and native and ornamental perennials. And I tried something completely new – a moss garden. The space was small but had lots of microenvironments and therefore needed micro gardens to fit them. By the time I left, the outdoor space there was a wonderful hidden refuge that looked like it belonged in a tropical rainforest.

And now I find myself in Connecticut, a place that is a far cry from both Oklahoma and Iowa as far as gardening goes. I was surprised at how wooded this state is; in the past the entire state except for the northwest corner had been cleared of trees and converted to little farms. Today it is densely populated and semi-mountainous, with scattered farms the farther east you go, and orchards and vineyards the farther west. The woods are thick, and the homes are often spaced widely apart, so in the spring, summer, and fall, one doesn’t even notice most of the houses. It just seems like you’re driving through the woods. It’s a spectacular landscape. The roads are all winding – nothing here is on a grid. The rivers are clear. There are burbling stone lined brooks and streams everywhere one turns – gorgeous water the likes of which I never saw in Iowa or Oklahoma. And because of the nearby Atlantic, the temperatures and general conditions are temperate and less variable than anywhere else I’ve lived. Intense cold doesn’t last long, and neither does intense heat. I get all the seasons with less weather drama. I do miss the intense thunderstorms of the Midwest, though. Talk about weather drama! The thrill of those powerful winds sweeping over the open land, the lightning, the thunder, the downpours, the gigantic hail, the constant threat of a tornado or blizzard wrecking everything – I loved it. Connecticut is nothing like Iowa or Oklahoma. It’s calm and neutral in comparison. I’m actually in zone 6 for plant hardiness now! I can grow things here that I could never succeed with in Iowa in spite of my green thumb. There is no winter deep freeze out here like the Midwest has, and no blasting of hot air for days on end at the height of summer. It’s humid, but not like the humidity of summer corn sweat in Iowa. The weather out here seems like a piece of cake in comparison.

The place we finally found after two years of searching during the worst housing market on the planet is a smallish house on one acre at the bottom of a mountain on the east side of a state park. It was a lucky find even though it cost twice as much as it should have in my opinion. It was badly overgrown. The house had a million things wrong with it, as did the outside gardens, driveway, and patios. The house sort of sits on a little cliff overlooking a small pond fed by a mountain brook and drained by a little spillway. The road is quiet, as the street is really just a long cul-de-sac that goes halfway up the mountain, so there’s almost no traffic. Across the road is a classic New England gentlemen’s farm with a house built in the 1800’s, a cool old barn, and a couple of horses on a little pasture, just enough of an open space to give my Midwestern eyes some relief from the dense woods all around. Our house was built in 1960. The owners planted white pines all around, some of which are well over a hundred feet tall. I guess they do well out here. They’re kind of terrifying, really. I keep wondering when they are going to fall on the house and kill me. But when storms come through our area, the woods all around and the mountain behind shelter the massive white pines from the brunt of the wind, and although they move around a lot, they seem to be perfectly stubborn in their grip to the earth. I don’t think they’re going anywhere, possibly for a hundred years. Who knows?

Our place is surrounded by second growth woods owned by the man across the road. Across the pond to the east is a large stand of black walnuts. To the south is mixed woods, and to the west is mostly sugar maples. The woods have not been managed, and Connecticut has a serious problem with invasive plant species, so our little property was being severely encroached upon by honeysuckle, bittersweet vines, Japanese Knotweed, multiflora rose, Bartlett pear trees, and burning bushes – all of which are affecting the growth of the large forest trees. In the south woods nearly every large tree was dying due to strangulation from bittersweet, Boston Ivy, grapevines, and climbing poison ivy. I asked the landowner if I could start doing some things in the woods to help the trees and he said fine as long as I don’t take down any healthy trees. Well, there was no danger of finding a healthy tree in that part, let alone taking one down! The invasive shrubs needed to be cut down and all of the vines shrouding the trees needed to be cut off at the base. That one simple maneuver would once again let the sun in so the trees and native forest floor plants could recover and thrive.

The brook flowing into the pond was overgrown as well, mostly with multiflora rosebushes. I hate that plant. It was all over Iowa too. It was brought in from Asia years ago to form livestock hedges, and it works. It’s a vicious plant with recurving thorns that grab you and won’t let go. It has to be chopped out with the base poisoned or monitored for new growth. Its only natural predators are a virus that kills it sometimes, and goats, which you have to tie to the shrub. I don’t know how they can eat it without bleeding to death, but they do. The seeds are spread by birds, and it just comes up everywhere. It can be killed by cutting it back repeatedly month after month, which though time consuming, is better than putting herbicide in the environment.

The far side of the pond had ALL of the invasives. They were growing so aggressively they were climbing right into the pond. Where was the edge? It turns out it was, in some places, twenty feet back from where the plants were invading the water. And then there was some horrible invasive grass growing around the pond that I have been unable to identify; it has tiny silica barbs all over the leaves and stems which will cut you to ribbons if you try to remove it without gloves and a long-sleeved shirt. And then there was the poison ivy, my god. It had completely covered the edges of the yard, the slope in front of the house, and a huge swath along the driveway. It had literally buried all sorts of artifacts placed by previous property owners, like a little arroyo down by the pond, boulders, and a cement Chinese dragon dog statue. It turned out that about 100 square feet of the lower patio was covered with a layer of dirt and grass a foot deep. I just kept finding things, hints of what had gone on there in the past sixty-five years. I started feeling like an archeologist.

In front of the house and along the drive there had once been well-manicured formal gardens. They were still there, still pretty, but unkempt. Many plants were not in the correct place considering the available sunlight. Some were struggling. But clearly someone in the past had known their ornamental plants and knew something about garden design. There were many fine specimens buried in there that had to be uncovered, and later, many that had to be moved to more suitable environs.

It took a year and a half to get it all cleaned up. The pond is now an oasis with flowering water plants along the edges and floating lily pads in the middle. A little dinghy with wooden oars is roped to the bank. The brook has been uncovered and made into a series of little waterfalls. In the spring it is infiltrated with skunk cabbage, a plant that melts the snow with it stinky huge flower in late winter, then later puts out giant leaves that look like hostas. I planted a miniature conifer garden, an herb garden, and a vegetable garden by the lower brick patio. Two hundred tulip and daffodil bulbs went in all around the house this fall. The soil has been a challenge, with all of its rocks and variable nutrient values; it was hard to plant bulbs. A Zen garden has been added behind the house. Flowering and ornamental trees have been added, along with many shrubs. The forest all around has been cleared of many invasive plants and unnecessary saplings. The grassy areas all around the pond have been overseeded with native wildflowers for bees, butterflies, and other insects; these areas will no longer be mowed as they were in the past, and within two years it will change the surrounding ecosystems. Last year there was a pair of Mallards looking to nest somewhere beside the pond, but there was no place for them. The far side was too overgrown, and the rest was too exposed due to mowing. Next year they will be able to find a place. I put up two wood duck nest boxes, so maybe we’ll have those too. This summer three river otters showed up in the pond! There are Canada geese across the road on the pasture, and there’s a kingfisher and a blue heron that spend a lot of time catching bullfrogs out there. There are blue crayfish and little salamanders in the pond, and other types of frogs and toads in the tall grass. I’d like to make a fish ladder by the spillway to see if any trout might migrate to the pond and on upstream in the spring to spawn.

We have been startled by the wildlife out here. Lots of songbirds. Lots of black bears. Bobcats. Hawks. Grey squirrels. Deer. Chipmunks. Snakes. Coyotes. Foxes. Apparently even fisher cats have re-entered the state. Where are the mountain lions, I wonder. Frankly, it’s perhaps a little dangerous. We don’t walk around outside here after dark. I have to warn the granddaughters to check for bears, bobcats, and coyotes when they walk out the door and to be aware of their environment at all times. We have to teach about deadly ticks, poison plants, and mosquitoes too. Living in the woods is not for the faint-hearted. You have to learn a lot and pay attention to what’s going on around you.

And the drivers! If you don’t get killed in the woods, you certainly may on the road! I’ve never been any place where people drive so badly! Tailgating, no turning signals, speeding and swerving in and out of traffic, and running red lights are the name of the game. Everyone is in a rush except for me. Thankfully our little town is pretty quiet, but every time we leave our little forest oasis, we have to drive like A.J. Foyt. The Mini Cooper goes into sports mode and off we zoom! If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.