A bit of height

Thanks to another end-of-the-season clearing out find of Sam's, I've now got a vertical element in the sprawling front garden. When Matt and I first began this garden soon after we were married, there was a crab apple tree in this location, under which the grass did not grow, thus our decision to turn it into a shade garden. That crab is long gone, long enough that the stump was completely rotted and very easy to turn into the dirt to make room for something new.

Thank you, Sam, for thinking of us, and finding something fun to anchor the center of this garden again!

My little helper

The best times gardening are when my helpers are with me.

Sam dropped off a few heucheras a few days ago, so taking advantage of the beautiful November weather, Rinnah, Gloria, and I went out and got them into the ground in the new garden down by the road.

Motley Garden

motley (mot-lee) adj. 1. Varied in color. 2. Composed of discordant elements; heterogeneous; diversified.

For years I’ve wanted to give our house a name. Although I remember talking about it briefly with Matt, he has no recollection of it – apparently it meant more to me than to him! But at the time, we couldn’t come up with anything. But the idea lingered in my head for a long time, and periodically I would try things out, but nothing stuck.

Then one day our neighbor lent me some of her favorite flower garden books written by an English author, and I was once again inspired to start thinking – obviously, English gardens and country houses would have names, like Barnley Hall, or Cotsworth, etc. And that’s when it came to me - “Motley Garden.” There’s an obvious reference to the gardens surrounding our home. As I walk through the gardens, there are so many memories – the hydrangea by the door that was from Matt’s Dad’s funeral; the crabapple trees from our neighbor who works at a garden center and brought home the ones they weren’t going to winter over last year; the bleeding hearts that I have loved since my grandparents bought me a tiny one when I was maybe five years old; the humongous white lilies that Matt and I picked out of a flower catalog years ago, the peonies that we pulled out of his grandma’s back garden before we rearranged for the fill from excavating for the addition, the gooseneck from a past clients back garden (“Here! Take a shovelful of this before you go! But be careful – it spreads!”); the limestone walls built from rock Matt’s Dad and his cousin pulled out of the river flats many years ago when the MSP airport was being built; the bridal veil bush that Matt’s grandparents planted that we thought we’d have to dig out for the addition, but didn’t; the oak tree we dug up at a friend’s cabin when Owen was not yet born (Owen’s tree!); the red daylily my brother- and sister-in-law gave me for my birthday (and the big red one I picked out for myself!) It’s a very varied conglomeration, but the joy of gardening to me is the constant and steady movement and development and growth of all of the pieces, every year bigger and more full, massaged and edited here and there to create a thing of increasing beauty. It’s not a garden that was designed all at once and installed, but something that’s grown over time with the bits I’ve been given – it’s a motley garden.

But there’s so much about the garden and gardening that intertwines with our life as a family. Not only is the garden itself a calming outlet for me that allows me to pursue a hobby without ever leaving my home (something which matters a lot when you have a family that makes it tough to get out!) but it’s also a picture of what it’s like to be part of a family, and particularly part of a family like ours. Every single one of us is growing, and one of my jobs as a mother is tending these young little sprouts and guiding them to grow tall and strong and true through daily watering, weeding, and sometimes pruning or transplanting.

My dad likes to refer to his grandkids as a motley crew, and they certainly are – a many-colored, diverse batch of individuals – sometimes truly “discordant elements” all composing one family. Just like I enjoy my wild, fleeting, self-seeding (in odd places, sometimes) poppies next to my steady trio of petite, well-behaved golden-edged hostas, it is the combination of all of the individual persons that makes our family a beautiful thing.

Our family is particularly diversified with our mix of boys and girls, Bulgarian-born and Minnesota-born, able-bodied and physically-challenged, some ready to take on the world (by the horns, for some of them!) and some content to take whatever comes. I like to picture God as the Master Gardener who picked all of these many “colors” and placed them together in one garden, and given me the little job of puttering and tending.

So, we’re rolling it around and trying it on for size, but I just think we might have a name that our home can live up to!

Motley Garden.

(It may also be worth mentioning that the last definition of “motley” in my dictionary is as follows:

n. An outfit variously colored, used by a clown.

 

Looks like we could make that work, too. 😏)

Gabion wall

 It just occurred to me that I can write back posts with the date function so as to not forget about significant garden memories, like this one! So, I'm writing this 7/30/21, but posting it for five years ago when the work actually happened...

Matt and I have always thought gabion walls were really cool. So, when the city decided to do some work on our street and put in a parking lane which required demolishing the regional trail AND the colored concrete edging (both of which were replaced 8' further in at the end of the summer), we asked the crew if they would give us the slabs, and they did! Then it was just a simple matter (ha ha!) of smashing up the slabs with a sledge hammer. :)

Thankfully, Matt's not the only man around this house! At eleven years old, Owen's got enough oomph inside of him to get quite a lot accomplished.

Looking back at this photo I love the pretty nodding wild onion in the foreground! :)

While the smashing was happening at the end of the driveway, the digging and pounding of rebar and the building of the 4x4 grid with 2x4 mesh behind was coming along. The goal with the wall was to create an edge to the front yard to make it easier for the kids (ahem, Reuben!) to know where to stop and where's too far.

And then the exciting part began! All summer as we were working, we jokingly called this the "man quilt." As a quilter myself, I had often laughed at a comic I saw once of a man lamenting to his wife that all she does is buy big pieces of fabric, cut it up into small pieces, and then put them back together into big pieces again! Well, that's what we were doing here. Smash up big slabs and concrete and then put them back together into a different (but much more interesting!) sort of slab. Yes. I do love quilting, particularly, I've learned, scrap quilting, and this Motley Garden is no exception. I thrill at finding ways to work with what we have to make something more than what it was before!

Another delightful piece of this project was how interested Reuben was in the process. It's hard (and still is five years later!) to engage him and help him be a part of what we're doing, but this was just the right variety of repetitive task that grips his interest.

He loves filling the wheelbarrow, here with help from two and a half year old Evania.

And then these three fill up the wall!

Isn't it pretty??