Daily life: "The lovely wild place"
"'I wouldn't want to make it look like a gardener's garden, all clipped an' spick an' span, would you?' he said. 'It's nicer like this with things runnin' wild, an' swingin' an' catchin' hold of each other."
"'Don't let us make it tidy,' said Mary anxiously. 'It wouldn't seem like a secret garden if it was tidy.'"
--Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Secret Garden.
That's what I want too: a "lovely wild place" that "would be a wilderness of growing things." But I'm darned if I can find any writings on this topic.
What I want are some writings - online or in book form - about taking care of one's home landscape, with minimal interference.
I've tried looking under every keyword I can thinking of - natural gardening, sustainable gardening, organic gardening, conservation, forestry management, native landscapes, habitat garden - and I can't find anything that talks about conserving what you already have. They all seem to assume that the homeowner will want to plant things.
I don't want to plant. I want to take care of my garden in such a way that seeds or nuts that plant themselves will grow. And I want to leave plants alone, as much as possible, to see what they do.
My mother, when she sold us this house, told me how to prune the rose in our back yard. I didn't prune it. As a result, we now have an eight-foot-high rose. It's awfully interesting to see it swaying in the wind.
I'm getting rid of the English ivy because it's taking over our lawn and choking the other plants. I'd like to do anything else that needs to be done to encourage young plants to grow.
o--o--o
They were working industriously round one of the biggest standard roses when he caught sight of something which made him utter an exclamation of surprise.
"Why!" he cried, pointing to the grass a few feet away. "Who did that there?"
It was one of Mary's own little clearings round the pale green points.
"I did it," said Mary.
"Why, I thought tha' didn't know nothin' about gardenin'," he exclaimed.
"I don't," she answered, "but they were so little, and the grass was so thick and strong, and they looked as if they had no room to breathe. So I made a place for them."
o--o--o
That's my vision of gardening. The closest I've been able to find what I'm looking for is information on the Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka, but again, he's talking about planting, not letting seeds plant themselves.
Have you guys stumbled across anything similar to what I'm talking about? Do you have any suggestions for keywords I could try?
"'Don't let us make it tidy,' said Mary anxiously. 'It wouldn't seem like a secret garden if it was tidy.'"
--Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Secret Garden.
That's what I want too: a "lovely wild place" that "would be a wilderness of growing things." But I'm darned if I can find any writings on this topic.
What I want are some writings - online or in book form - about taking care of one's home landscape, with minimal interference.
I've tried looking under every keyword I can thinking of - natural gardening, sustainable gardening, organic gardening, conservation, forestry management, native landscapes, habitat garden - and I can't find anything that talks about conserving what you already have. They all seem to assume that the homeowner will want to plant things.
I don't want to plant. I want to take care of my garden in such a way that seeds or nuts that plant themselves will grow. And I want to leave plants alone, as much as possible, to see what they do.
My mother, when she sold us this house, told me how to prune the rose in our back yard. I didn't prune it. As a result, we now have an eight-foot-high rose. It's awfully interesting to see it swaying in the wind.
I'm getting rid of the English ivy because it's taking over our lawn and choking the other plants. I'd like to do anything else that needs to be done to encourage young plants to grow.
They were working industriously round one of the biggest standard roses when he caught sight of something which made him utter an exclamation of surprise.
"Why!" he cried, pointing to the grass a few feet away. "Who did that there?"
It was one of Mary's own little clearings round the pale green points.
"I did it," said Mary.
"Why, I thought tha' didn't know nothin' about gardenin'," he exclaimed.
"I don't," she answered, "but they were so little, and the grass was so thick and strong, and they looked as if they had no room to breathe. So I made a place for them."
That's my vision of gardening. The closest I've been able to find what I'm looking for is information on the Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka, but again, he's talking about planting, not letting seeds plant themselves.
Have you guys stumbled across anything similar to what I'm talking about? Do you have any suggestions for keywords I could try?
I want clover and daisies and buttercups - and other flowers, if I can persuade them to grow. I want different kinds of grass, seeding themselves. I have a herb bed which I try to keep more or less neat, but I love my meadow - the thick rich grass, scattered with tiny bright flowers. It's taking time and patience and sometimes I try things that don't work because I don't know exactly what I'm doing here.
My neighbour's granddaughter wandered into my garden one day, and looked around, and said "You've got so much more here than my granddad," and I said something anodyne about how everyone has the garden that suits them, which is true... but secretly I rejoiced, because, yes. His garden has tidy flowers in pots and a neat lawn and one well-trimmed small tree.
Mine has tall flowering clover plants, white and red: buttercups and daisies. Moss and mint and lemon verbena. Native herbs growing in big healthy bushes.
Yes! I want two meadow patches in my yard. I'm going to have to proceed cautiously, though, because my community has a law against "weeds" that are over a certain height. But this is an environmental-friendly community, so I think I can get away with a couple of "meadow gardens" if I do it the right way.
And there are lots of gardening books out there that talk about growing meadows. They usually have the words backyard or natural or wildlife somewhere in their title. The one I like the best is Sara Stein's Noah's Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Back Yards.
"Mine has tall flowering clover plants, white and red: buttercups and daisies. Moss and mint and lemon verbena. Native herbs growing in big healthy bushes."
(*Turns green with envy.*)
(*Ahem, yes. I suppose green would be right color.*)
Permaculture
A permaculturist would probably say the first thing to do is observe, observe, observe. What's in your garden now might be perfectly capable of maintaining itself with minimal interference from you. Or, what you have might not be the kind of plants that can be perennial or self-sowing annuals or biennials in your area. Maybe they could be but they're missing some crucial soil nutrient, but you won't know what it is until you know what plants you have and what they need. In fact, you may need to plant some things, because it's likely that the garden you have was not designed to be a complete ecosystem in and of itself. Or, as you've discovered, you may need to get rid of some things.
You might need to invest a lot of work in the initial stages, to create a system that's balanced and can maintain itself without your interference indefinitely. But there's no way of knowing until you know what's keeping your garden from being that dynamically balanced system now. What else do you find yourself having to do?
For instance, if you have to water it too much, what's keeping it from living off rainwater? Is it full of plants that are too thirsty for your climate? You could: learn some natural irrigation techniques (look for "irrigating with ollas"), improve the soil to hold moisture better, invest time and money in a rain barrel and gravity-fed drip system, or gradually pull out the thirsty plants and replace them with drought-tolerant ones... or resign yourself to watering regularly. Or by observation you might find that when it does rain all the water ends up in one swampy corner, and you might have to dig some swales so that the rainwater spends longer in the other parts of your garden and soaks into the soil.
It sounds like your rose is doing just peachy, and pulling out that English ivy sounds like a great move if it's a nuisance. What else do you have to work with?
Toby Hemenway (http://www.patternliteracy.com/index.html)'s book Gaia's Garden (http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/gaias_garden_second_edition:paperback) may be of help to you. I don't have it yet; I think it'll be my next purchase.
Re: Permaculture
Oh, yes, I've just been reading about permaculture. Thanks for the book recommendations!
"In fact, you may need to plant some things, because it's likely that the garden you have was not designed to be a complete ecosystem in and of itself."
Heh. My yard, as it was bought by my parents in 1974, was practically stripped down to its bones. (The land had been developed only fourteen years before.) Thankfully, my mother was an angel of salvation and went on a vigorous planting campaign - she actually planted fifty forsythia shrubs, among many other things. As a result, thirty-five years later, the back yard and front yard and part of the east side yard is brimming with plant life.
To what extent it's an eco-system I'm gradually figuring out. My mother must have had some sense of ecology, because I remember her telling me how much the birds like the pyracantha, but she learned to garden in an era before native plants were common in gardens. (Not that they're as common as they should be now.)
One thing I'm counting on is that I'm very close to parkland, so hopefully some of the right seeds will end up in my yard.
"What's in your garden now might be perfectly capable of maintaining itself with minimal interference from you."
I already know that what's there can survive without me, because I haven't gardened since I bought this house fourteen years ago. :)
"What else do you find yourself having to do?"
The situation with the ivy was what alerted me to the fact that I might need to intervene. I've looked around the yard since then, and the only problem spots I've noticed is the lack of flowers (because Doug has been cutting the lawn), the lack of water (I need to start a birdbath), and the possibility that some growing trees will topple over a low garden wall.
"For instance, if you have to water it too much"
I've never watered it. The zoysia grass looks a little pale, and we've lost some trees and most of the roses, but everything else has survived. My mother seems to have planted a lot of hardy shrubs.
"Or by observation you might find that when it does rain all the water ends up in one swampy corner"
What happens is worse than that: in the back yard, the rainwater (both ours and the rainwater from the neighbors that are uphill from us) all goes down a gully that is rapidly being stripped down to the soil. So yes, I need to look into the water situation at some point.
"What else do you have to work with?"
A lot of plants I don't yet know the names of. :) I'll give a full run-down in later posts, but to summarize, what we have is several tall trees, several short trees, about a zillion shrubs, a considerable amount of moss, a lot of ivy and periwinkle that I'll be pulling up (and which will leave tons of room for the growing of more shrubs and trees), and the zoysia grass that Doug and I both hate.
So basically what I have in mind is giving more room to the woody areas in the front yard and east side yard and turning some of the lawn area in the front and back into meadow.
What I'm worrying about right now is mainly borders around the wild parts of our yard. I need some borders, to reassure the neighbors that we aren't planning total chaos in our yard, but all I can think of that's free is logs, which will take time to collect. And I can't afford to buy anything.