Almost There

Last month I bagan the recovery of a back yard, behind an independent book store near my place. I called it The Birth of a Garden, and today I reached a turning point in the project. All the vegetation (well as much as needed cutting) has been cut away, all the junk and debris has been removed, and now all the branches & leaves that I cut away have been burned! I had complaints about the smoke when I tried a bonfire during the week but today there was no problem.

This doesn't really look like much but what I see, with my biased eyes, is an event space --film screenings, lectures, dinner parties, musical performances. The obstacle to doing any of this was that the space was long-cluttered with rotting and broken things and overgrown with invasive paper mulberry trees and cascades of ivy everywhere, making it a dark, wet, and clogged waste-of-a-space. I want to eliminate the part of the fence that circumvents the centuries-old Ailanthus tree and build a picnic table, wrapped around in its place. Eventually a full-sized brick BBQ stove --or even a stone pizza oven? It's a cynch that a tire needs to be hung by a rope from a high branch for kiddies to swing on.

Stay tuned for further developments in my dinky little garden. Event ideas are being hatched for September.