Getting to Know the Garden

Last year was a doozy of a year. Family illnesses and emergencies made it hard to find time to garden; falling off the front steps right at the juncture of spring and summer and breaking my arm effectively wiped out any gardening ambitions.

So although I certainly enjoyed seeing the magnolia bloom, the azaleas and rhododendrons burst in fireworks of blossoms, and the dogwoods deck themselves out in spangles of starlike flowers, I didn't really get to know the garden on that intimate, shovels-in-the-dirt, gravel-in-the-knees way that I'd gotten acquainted with my Seattle garden of 18 years.

It was blissful to be gifted with so many beautiful, warm, dry days this April and May--days that conveniently fell on weekends--to explore our new garden and get to know it better at, literally, a grassroots level. I especially liked discovering how beautiful the tracery of veins in fallen magnolia leaves are.

Things are popping up all over the place that we labor to identify (and to determine if it's OK to let them stay, lest we find ourselves with a horror on our hands like the Himalayan Balsam non-native highly invasive species that briefly lurked in our Seattle garden).

Earlier in the season, a plant came up near the drainage ditch out front that made me hold back the overeager scuffle hoe. There was something about the leaves that gave me pause, the way you might hesitate upon meeting someone who reminds you of somebody else.

I think I've managed to identify it as a native wildflower, the large-leafed geum. Cultivated geums are among my favorite flowers, so that explains why this plant tugged at my heartstrings and prevented me from tugging at its roots.

Apparently, the timing of this plant's growth of new leaves correlates with the birthing season of seals, so now every spring I can stand at the base of the driveway, check the drainage ditch, and say in tones of great profundity, "Somewhere, right now, a baby seal is being born."

Up the slope from this wildflower is a super-sized bleeding heart, which I saw briefly last year but really noticed this spring, especially as the plum tree that once stood next to it fell down in a windstorm this past autumn.

Bleeding hearts are always lovely, but this particular plant is bewitching me because it seems to be producing a clutch of white flowers, too:

We also found a large patch of leaves that looked like those of columbine spreading across part of the front garden where little else grows in front of the shrubs. Now that they're flowering, they continue to look like columbines, and I think they're a variety called Clementine White.

The previous occupants of our house hired landscapers to take care of the garden, and someone in the past had professionals plan it all, so that there are lots of pretty, healthy shrubs and small trees (for which I am grateful; my last garden had to be hacked out of a thicket of half-dead trees and blackberry bushes and overgrown shrubs, so it was nice to start off with good bones in this garden).

They mainly covered open areas with layers of black bark, with the exception of one small area near the deck where someone planted a nice little garden of groundcovers and some daisies. I'm planning to slowly replace a lot of the bark with groundcovers elsewhere in the yard.

One nice surprise is an avenue of ferns that the landscaping crews were no doubt told to remove every spring, because they weren't here when we moved in but are now growing vigorously in a strip of stones bordering the deck. I think they're Lady's Ferns.

Ferns pop up all over the place, and I've added a bunch of ferns from the nursery (as part of the groundcover master plan). After taking a few books out of the library about ferns, I felt myself ready to go haring off in search of rare ferns and desirous of setting up a large upturned root section from a Douglas-fir in order to build a stumpery, the fern-garden setup that those crazy Victorians went mad for. Had to steel myself because It's Not Like I Don't Have Other Things I Must Be Doing. For now I'll just enjoy the built-in Douglas-fir stump sitting in the yard, and the huckleberry tree and ferns and moss growing on it.