Succulents

I had a carefully composed essay about our gardens all ready to publish yesterday. I got distracted adding a link to my prewritten words and then forgot to publish it! I guess there's such a thing as being too organized when one's mind remains messy.

The gist of what I wrote, sitting out on our patio, was that aside from our sojourn in Edinburgh, where the kids discovered that there were actually potatoes attached to those vines in the garden and picked every one of them, we have had only three gardens in the course of our married lives. It was the pot of succulents outside our bedroom door that started this train of thought because it has been in all three.

Our tiny, damp, shaded garden in Berkeley was the longest--45 years, and began as a patch of concrete and a patch of lawn. A narrow, built in bed next to the "patio" was planted with an ancient ivy vine with an exposed, hairy trunk that must have been two inches in diameter. It had been spray painted green and was surrounded by stones, which had been spray painted in pastel colors. It took the better part of 45 years,, and several periods of mandatory water rationing, to replace the ivy and the rocks with an espaliered apple tree,the cement with Mexican pavers, and the lawn with a mounded space with a rock river, a beautiful weeping cherry tree, and a fountain made from a big pot. I'm sad to say that we don't have a single picture of it, and we're told that the current owners have torn out everything and put in a lawn.

In Sebastopol, although we were renting, we had become good friends with the owners of our little farmhouse, and asked if we could put in a simple, graveled garden in front of the house to keep down the weeds, dust and mud. We created a bordered space with a path to the front door and a mound in the middle. We surrounded it with a bench, some Adirondack chairs and plants in pots to deter the gophers (capable of chewing off the roots of a plant and pulling it underground before our very eyes). OilMan built some new veggie boxes to supplement several that were already there. We were pleased with the results. Here is a picture I took of the work in progress. The current tenant apparently has no interest in gardening and has let whatever we didn't bring with us, to Santa Rosa die.
The succulent, which came from the Berkeley garden, and most of the other pots came to Santa Rosa with us.

And here we are in Santa Rosa, with a beautifully landscaped garden, a steep hill planted mostly with desert plants which grow successfully in the "soil" (which is 50% rock, 40& clay and a few bits of old leaves and compost). We call it our "Scottsdale garden" after the rock and cactus gardens that thrive in Arizona. Having spent days digging a few holes to replace that beautiful bright ice plant (which died in a frost), we have decided to spend most of our energy on the small level strip next to the patio where we can plant flowers and some color. We took out the almost useless pool, replaced it with another fountain made out of a big pot, and planted lots of flowers. Next, we'll take out the tiny patch of lawn and continue this bed.

As I wrote this i realized two things: we have gotten a lot of pleasure out of working in our gardens and Blipfoto has given me a record of the most recent ones.