By Abbie Panettiere, Master Gardener Class of '05
When my husband and I moved into our house seven years ago, he was
highly gratified to find that the place came with a mostly dead old
garden tractor. He spent that first winter, which fortunately
was a mild one, sharpening the old blades and buying an additional set
to be sure of always having sharp blades. He repaired the motor and
took it for several trial spins to be sure it worked, which it did.
We used the tractor's cuting and pulling power to help us get
rid of the honeysuckle, wild grape, poison ivy and wild rose that
climbed up the trees in the back of the property. It proved a
very useful tool for us in carting loads of firewood, mulch, and
anything likely to be too heavy and cumbersome to drag or pull by hand.
The the spring came and the grass began to grow. Now, he and I had always agreed, during the many years of our married life, that a green lawn was not something we were interested in growing. Acres of greensward were just a sign of conspicuous consumption since they served mainly to showcase te amount of space one was able to afford and since they required so much time and effort to keep up.
That spring, when he first got up on the tractor to mow, I thought, "Well OK, he'll try it out and he'll hate it." Mind you, this is the first lawn we had ever had. The clay-and-beer bottle soil of the tiny front yard we had in New York City's Queens supported a few trees, a massive yew, rosebushes and a rampant growth of forsythia which never bloomed; the apartment houses next door and to the south of us effectively blocked out more than a few daily hours of daylight.
Anyhow, up he went, the tractor roared into life and he headed out, grandly making the circuit from the house to the property edge, up the street and then back to the house, and so on in ever shrinking squares, avoiding all trees and very kindly not mowing down the many small plants I had just put in the ground. When he got off the tractor, I said, "Well, how was it?," in a sympathetic voice. My heart sank with the reply, "Not bad. It's fun to drive around and mow down anything I am at. It appeals to my destructive instincts." He had, I remember, an evil smile.
We settled into a pattern in which he mowed with the tractor and I followed along with a small 4 horsepowe push mower to do the "fiddly bits," the areas too small for the big mower to go into - mainly because I have small trees, bushes or plants there - and the areas under the trees, which are a real pain to get to and in which the grass is struggling, mostly unsuccessfully, to grow.
In the continuing and elaborate negotiations that husband and wife are apt to engage in, he has complained when I accidentally enlarged a garden by a few inches while edging it, taking some of his turf from him and made it more difficult to maneuver the vehicle around the obstacles. I have complained that the more shady areas that I mow should be planted with shade plants and ground cover since they really do not support grass well and that, in general, it's a real nuisance to have so much grass when you figure the time it takes to mow it, particularlly when the grass grows so fast, and also figuring in the cost of gasoline. This last argument gains increasing relevance, I feel, as the price of gas heads inexorably toward $4.00 per gallon. He counters that the cost of gasoline is small when balanced against the price of plant purchases and that the therapeutic value of driving his instrument of destruction saves hours of expensive psycotherapy.
Finally, in a negotiation in which he wanted something planted that I really was not particularly interested in, I extracted the promise that I could plant the space under the trees in shade plants. In great delight, I brought home some trillium and periwinkle from those my grandmother had planted years back. I grew hosta from seed and bought discount half-dead pots of it. My sister-in-law kindly gave me clumps of lily of the valley from her home.
Unfortunately, the deer discovered the hosta and I discovered that they really love it. I hung some soap from the trees, which many knowledgeable people said would deter deer, and even smeared the leaves of my hostas with some wasabi from a sushi lunch figuring that nobody in his right mind would eat anything that hot and that deer, being sensitive creatures, would feel the same way. Somehow, they got used to be bopped with the soap as they came in for lunch (I never understood why the soap would deter them), and managed to stomach the wasabi.
It has beeen a very enjoyable experience, therefore, learning how to properly make and stock a woodland garden. In researching and learning to identify the plants best suited to shady areas both in helping stock the Woodland Garden at the Teaching Garden (on the Benedictine Monastery grounds off of Linton Hall Road) and also to help prepare for the Spring Lawn and Garden Show, I have become more adept at looking for mostly native plants that deer don't particularly enjoy (keeping in mind that a hungry deer will eat almost anything, even if it has wasabi on it), selecting plants that are suited to the soil and moisture conditions we garden in and finding plants that bloom at different times so that there are always plants of interest at any time of the year. While the summer sun blazes overhead on the sunny plots and grassy areas, one can sit comfortably in the shade pulling the few weeds that have managed to come through the heavy mulch and occasionally watering the garden, particularly plants that have not been established themselves yet. The garden is beautiful to look at and requires very little labor to keep properly "dressedA" and ready to enjoy.
The Woodland Garden at the Teaching Garden is composted about twice a year, spring and fall, and watered and weeded whenever someone can get out to it (which is not as often as should be) and except for the discussions about what ought to go in next and whether there should be "drifts" of just a few plants or a few of as wide a selection as can be found, quite easy to manage and trouble free, and the perfect place to sit in quiet delight on days that otherwise would be too hot to enjoy.