Garden Notes

Early tulips in my garden

I am an artist/graphic designer and a frustrated gardener who for many years lived in apartments in Milwaukee and then in a duplex with a small shady yard. When my husband and I went hunting for a single family home, I was charmed not so much by the house we chose, but by the large lot the house stood on. It was a corner lot with a lot of shady sections, but also some large sunny areas. It came with mature crabapple and honey locust trees and a shrub border between our house and the closest neighbor.  My husband chose the house, but I agreed to the purchase because I could finally have a real garden.

I was told to wait for one year to make any major changes to the landscape so that I could see the yard in the different seasons and plan for any changes. I was anxious to begin, but pretty much tried to follow that advice, and I did find that my yard already had a lot of great plants. Actually it was a learning process, because I could not recognize some of the plants and had to wait until they bloomed to know if they were weeds or flowers. If it was a flower, sometimes I left it where it was and sometimes I moved it to a place I liked better once it had finished blooming. If it was a weed, then out it went along with all its little friends, since weeds seem to travel in gangs.

Our house is in a suburb that does not have sidewalks or streetlights and between our house and the street there are ditches to carry off excess rainwater. Those ditches make the edges of our lot very steep and hard to mow the grass. My husband complained about it, but I just thought “Hey, mowing is your job. I already take care of the garden!”

However, my husband hurt his knee, and eventually needed a knee replacement. When the lawn mowing fell to me, I found that the hills were in fact very hard to mow. After some thought, I decided to plant shrubs and perennials on the slope to eliminate that chore. Great idea, right? I thought so, but unfortunately, when it was finished, it looked exactly like somebody planted the slope so they wouldn’t have to mow. It was a long strip of green bushes – too obvious! Even though my planting eliminated the steep hill mowing job, I was not happy with how it looked.

I decided to extend the new section up onto the top of the hill and under the trees that lined the property. I used divisions of hostas and other shade perennials that we already had to fill the new space. What a difference! Now it was a beautiful shady garden that blended in nicely with the hill. Even better, now I don’t have to rake up the fallen crabapples in autumn, they just fell into the garden and became compost.

Another positive thing I noticed was that neighbors started walking by and would stop and compare notes about their gardens. I found that I was getting to know a lot of my neighbors – it’s fun. I like my new home better and better.