Our Secret Garden Takes Shape

I have always loved Frances Hodgson Burnett's classic children's book The Secret Garden and my summer 2008 garden project takes its inspiration from this story. The point of my Secret Garden is to create a defined garden space that would be set aside for future grandbabies. This should not be taken by my daughter as a challenge to speed up her biological clock as it will take the garden several years to mature! On the other hand . . .

My Secret Garden is the southeastern corner of our backyard. Its footprint is an approximately 25' X 40' plot running uphill from east towards west. It gets full sun during the morning and part of the afternoon which is really good for our yard.

This garden will be inhabited only by plants that children love and that can be easily grown, easily harvested and eaten right on the spot. Strawberries, blueberries, currents, sunflowers, carrots, radishes, green beans, apples, plums, etc. will be the mainstays of this garden along with flowers. It will also be hidden away from the rest of the yard surrounded by an English-style privet hedge. You enter through a garden path framed by an arbor. Many of our family are performers of one type or another, so I am creating a stage where plays or other performances can take place. At the crown of the hill overlooking the garden and stage, a summer house will be constructed. It will be a retreat for anyone wishing a place to go to write, sketch, meditate, nap or just to use your imagination! Grandbabies will find their own gardening tools, gloves and hats waiting and it will become a place for their imagination to take flight. The architecture for the structure hasn't been selected as yet, but the structure is a couple of years in the future so we have some time to think about that.

Step one was completed earlier in the Spring when I purchased and planted 2 new apple trees (I'm especially proud of the old-fashioned Gravenstein), an Italian Plum and 2 beautiful hazelnut trees. These trees define the north and south boundaries of the Secret Garden.

Step 2 was building 2 new raised beds seen in this photo looking east towards the barn. The beds were built of 2" X 6" cedar and anchored in place with 2" X 2" stakes on each corner and at the mid points along the long sides. Each bed, measures 4' X 8'. The difficulty in actually placing them in their permanent location was getting them level in a location that runs down hill both east/west and north/south. Yikes! On the uphill side of the beds the top edge was nearly at ground level while the other side stood at its full 12" height.

I found my arbor, which will serve as the entry into the Secret Garden, at a local garden center. I was especially proud of this purchase since I had almost purchased it earlier in the season when it went on sale the first time. For some reason I didn't buy it and it went back to full price for a time. A couple of weeks later it went on sale again, this time for a significantly lower price than the first time. As an added incentive it was already put together. It sat upright at a funny angle in the yard for several weeks until I could get to that part of the project.

Here the arbor has been put in place. As with the raised beds the slope of the hillside made placing the arbor level a real challenge. I dug a hole, removing sod, rocks and dirt down to a level so that the arbor would stand level front to back and side to side. Doing this required that I build a small retaining wall on the uphill side of the arbor since the proximity of the hole to the nearby hazelnut tree could be a problem down the road. The wall was built on a bed of gravel and constructed of the pre-made concrete decorative blocks popular today and available at most garden and hardware centers.

Then I drove long stakes through the holes in the base of the four legs to give it some stability. I buried the base with soil up to the level where the gravel path would be laid. Black ground cloth was cut to fit the area and then the limestone gravel carefully shoveled onto the cloth creating a 2 inch thick gravel path. This added to the further stability of the base.

Walking through the arbor lands you on a downhill slope which immediately put you off balance so I cut further into the hill to create a terraced entry space. This created a 4-6 inch drop in elevation which was a problem if you wanted to turn and walk uphill. So I purchased more of the retaining wall blocks and used them to create a single step defining the beginnings of a stair system which will be added to if needed. The step will lead uphill to the right and to the future location of another building for children.

I decided I wanted a gravel path at the bottom of the garden space leading along an already established flower bed and ending with a wide, open space that would serve as a stage where kids could put on plays. It is backed by an already established shrub 8 feet tall and 12 feet wide covered with beautiful purple flower spikes during the mid-summer. On either side I will plant a arbovitae to define the sides of the stage and give it that Greek amphitheater look. At center stage will sit a cement Greek-style bench for those who just want to sit in the garden. Below the path is completed and wraps around the back of the barn where a small lean to greenhouse will be built for growing starts for annuals and for the vegetable garden beds. At the far end of the path you can see the widened area that will be used as the stage for the amphitheater. The cedar 2 X 6's leaning against the barn roof will become the audience bench seats along the long side of each raised bed facing the stage.

I am now in the process of tilling the north side border of the Secret Garden so that I can plant a hedge of Golden Vicary Privet. This will lend an more formal accent to the Secret Garden. Along the southern side of the hedge, on the inside of the Secret Garden, will be enough bed space to plant more flowers and some blueberries. I planted 2 blueberries many years ago but located them in a too shady location, so I am hoping that I can transplant them and have them become much more fruitful in the coming years. The photo at right shows a portion of the new bed and the planted privet hedges which will eventually be about 5 feet high and wide sequestering the new garden from the rest of the yard. An underground automatic drip irrigation system runs beneath the bed.

When I have finished my projects for this summer in the Secret Garden, I will have only one major hardscape portion to build in order to finish off this garden space. At the top of the hill overlooking the entire Secret Garden, I will construct a playhouse. The architecture is yet to be decided as are the final dimensions. I haven't decided whether to make a summer retreat large enough to be able to go take a nap in or sit and write or sketch, or whether to just keep it simple as a child's playhouse. I'll post more photos as the garden grows and I add significantly to it. In the meantime, I need to get back to the garden!

My Garden Beginnings

As I have already stated, our yard space is a quarter acre and oddly shaped. As a result, and partially due to the garden layout that has come to my mind as this undertaking has unfolded, I have tried to create garden spaces that are sort of gardens within the garden.

There is the Upper Garden which sits at the top of the hill above the house. This is where my gardening began. We I started out all that was there was just a previously planted Italian plum tree, a couple of rows of raspberries and a vegetable garden I attempted right in the ground. I planted a couple of apple trees which I tried to espallier and a cherry which didn't turn out to be a dwarf so its fruit is nearly impossible to retrieve.

Then the raspberries died and about that same time I lost interest in gardening for a time. The upper garden remained fallow and eventually a rather unhealthy lawn took hold.

For whatever reason, about eight years ago we decided it was time to take back the upper garden and we began landscaping that area. We invited a landscaper from the Garden Spot here in Bellingham to take a look and draw up a plan. She gave us some great ideas for the anchor plants like Rhododendrons and Oregon Grape.

I purchased a Mantis, a cute little garden tiller that works like a horse and has been a real god-send ever since its arrival. This little 2-cycle tiller has tines that will not break, and in the 5 years I have owned it I have never done anything except empty the gas at the end of each season. It still starts up with one ot two pulls of the starter and I can't imagine what I would have done without it. Best of all it only weighs 20 pounds.

The Mantis made quick work of the hilltop even though the land up there is chalk full of rocks. The Mantis would either bounce off of them causing me to dig it up and toss it in the rock pile or the Mantis would clog up with certain sized rocks that brought everything to a halt until the rock was dislodged. When the hilltop was tilled, the weeds and lawn raked out and the land leveled, it was time to build the hardscape.

We chose to build a cedar arbor kit we found in Canada (much cheaper than any we could find in the US at the time). It became the entrance to the upper garden. A path of pavers was built through the arbor entrance leading to a 6' X 9' patio. On either side of the patio we built 2-4' X 8' raised beds for vegetables and herbs. These were made of cedar as well. When completed the area was dramatically transformed and began to look like the framework for a real garden.

Next the plants were brought in and placed according to the plans we were given by Garden Spot. We did wind up shifting and even adding plants since we chose to take in more space than originally planned for this garden area. The latest photo of this areas shows the dramatic improvement over the past 4-5 years. Now recognizable only by the blue water fawcet. Oh, and that blue fawcet? It has an interesting story as well. It is commonly called a farmer's fawcet. It allows the water to drain down below the frost line after it is turned off so freezing temperatures will not burst a pipe during the winter. When we moved into this house it had only one fawcet and it was located under the back deck. It required a section of the deck be removed, you got down on your belly and reached down among the bugs and cobwebs to obtain water for the entire quarter acre. Unbelievable, but true! We now have three of these farmer fawcets, one next to the barn, another behind the gazebo and the one pictured in the upper garden. Water? No longer a problem in my garden.

The upper garden is now home to a pear, two apple, the original cherry, a new dwarf variety cherry and that old plum tree. The raised beds provide us with several herbs including Italian parsley, oregano, sage, chives, rosemary, fennel, thyme as well as lettuce, onions, beets, cauliflower, broccoli, peas and green beans.

Two new raised beds added this season have greatly added to what we can now grow and that project will be discussed in a future blog post.

In My Garden

If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.

--Cicero

My backyard is my favorite place in all the world. It is a quarter acre of lawn surrounded by ever growing numbers of flower beds, gently taken back from what was almost entirely weeds and very little else.

The yard is an odd shape, fenced in on all sides to ward off the deer that used to wander in and munch on whatever I tried to grow. It is surrounded by five neighbors most of whom care little for their own yards so the six-foot high fence is practical in that regard as well.

Slowly over the past 13 years we have transformed this space into a paradise in which we can't seem to spend enough time. With our summers our own, however, and the weather much more cooperative, our garden seems to take gentle leaps forward, each one making it closer to our dream.

The mystery surrounding a garden is that the gardener will never know how the story ends. Yet I continue to inch forward, planting new varieties, new species, some new hardscape.

I sit among my flowers and trees, the fruit trees with limbs bowed down with promise and the patches of vegetables supplying our summer dinner table and marvel at what I have created in such a short time.
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This summer I have finished some projects, taken on some new ones all with the goal of our September party for Kate and Nick looming on the horizon. The yard must peak at that time so that it is at its most beautiful, the lawn its greenest, the flowers their most bountiful and with not a weed to be seen.

These photos of the site in our yard where a gazebo now stands. These are the before and after photos.

So I will place photos and progress reports on this blog for the next couple of months documenting the progress made on my projects, showing before and afters of past and current projects as well.

These are before and after photos of the hardscape of our upper garden. Today the landscape has filled in and it is a lush and beautiful place to sit and watch our squirrels scamper about and the butterflies flit!

On Our Way Home!

Headed home this morning. But on our way Leslie talked me into an overnight in Portland. We had lunch reservations at Higgins in Portland anyway and by the time we arrived we were feeling weary so she got on the phone and got us reservations at the Clarion Hotel near the airport. But first, Higgins!

I now understand why this restaurant has received such distinction. Rated by Gourmet magazine as one of the top 10 restaurants in the country, it exceeded all my expectations. The flavors and combinations were masterfully created, took their cues from the seasonally available, locally-made charcuteries, fromages, fruits and vegetables. That is Greg Higgins way. It is his trademark. He is a master. The French bistro influence is apparent both in the decor and Greg's philosophy of cooking. Buying local and cooking seasonally is not something new. The French never lost track of it. It was the way of things have been for thousands of years for most people. But in a 20th century where we got further away from the source, turned fresh foods into canned or cryogenically sealed or prepackaged in layers and layers of plastic, we have succeded in nearly losing touch with what our food and where it comes from. We can now buy most foods we like on a whim. Want cherries in January? No problem. Chile is growing them. It doesn't matter that they must travel thousands of miles to get to us or what carbon footprint it leaves.

How wonderful it is that we are beginning to see more and more people understand the beauty and importance of eating and living in the seasons, in sustaining local farmers and merchants. The positive impact this lifestyle can have on every part of your local economy is nothing short of amazing.

Greg Higgins restaurant is a microcosm of this philosphy. He doesn't sacrifice quality. In fact the quality is all the better because the ingredients were harvested only minutes or hours before appearing on your plate. Higgins is a place I will return every chance I get when in Portland.

Tomorrow we head home. I will look forward to checking on my garden and to harvesting greens for a fresh salad made with a fresh herb vinaigrette. Ah, home sweet home.

Final Day the Best!

Our last day at the OSF and two wonderful shows. First up was August Wilson's Fences one of a series of ten plays Wilson wrote about the African Americn experience in the 20th century. We have thoroughly enjoyed 5 of his plays having seen them in various locals and mediums over the years. We saw one of them in Seattle, another in NYC, another on TV. Regardless, the productions have all been fabulously staged and acted and this production was no different. Starring Charles Robinson, famous for his roles in Night Court and Home Improvement, he was stunning in his portrayal of Troy Maxson, a man embittered by the disappointments of life--the lost opportunity to play professional baseball and making poor decisions that send him to prison for a time and of course those opportunities not available due to his race. He, nevertheless, loves his family and does the best he can to take care of them, flawed as he is. The cast was superb and the story so moving. We can't wait until the next time an August Wilson play crosses our path.

We had dinner at the New Sammy Cowboy Bistro in Talent, a restaurant we had read about in Gourmet Magazine. Located along the old highway 99 between Ashland and Medford, New Sammy's owners grow much of their own produce and herbs in an adjacent garden fun to wander through before your reservation time. A funky, eclectic decor, the bistro has a knowledgable, friendly staff lead by co-owner Vernon Rollins--his wife Charlene is the chef and runs the kitchen end.

Several mini-courses surprised us along our culinary journey including an egg cup filled with a wonderful concoction of flying fish roe marinated in wasabi and a cheese bruschetta. My main was freshly flown in sashimi-grade Ahi Tuna perfectly seared. Leslie had ravioli stuffed with 3 different cheeses. Our dessert was a homemade strawberry ice cream in a warm puff pastry floating in strawberry-rhubarb coulis. Sweet and sour, hot and cold, it was delicious!

Sammy's is a place you want to make reservations for well in advance, but it is the best restaurant anywhere in the area for a special night out. Our bill with apperif, 2 glasses of wine, salad, main, a shared dessert and coffee came to $150 with tip.

Our final evening at the OSF was a performance of Our Town by Thornton Wilder. It was wonderful to see this old chestnut of a play brought to life again. I performed as a part of the cast in a college production in 1972, but I never realized the power of Wilder's words. Many in this cast do a wonderful job. Most noteable the part of the stage manager and Emily's father. What bothers me most about this show was the way it was cast. In the Playbill notes from the director, she mentions the racial overtones within the play as an issue (a point I whole-heartedly disagree with. Yet she has gone ahead and cast the show with mixed race married couples and set them down in an early 1900's small New England town where just such a thing could never have happened. Key members of the cast are weak and unimpressive, especially the actresses playing Emily, a critical role and the actress playing George Gibb's mother. Yet despite the shortcomings of this production, we found ourselves moved by the sheer power of Wilder's message and by some of the staging decisions made by the director. In the final scene, the entire cast is seated in the cemetary. The stage manager walks over, takes his seat among the dead and you hear a collective sigh from them all as the stage goes to black. Oh, my! Brilliant! Despite its faults and there were many, the brilliance of Wilder's message shines through and we were moved to tears. A great end to our time here at the OSF. We look forward to returning next year.

Day 3 At The OSF!

Our first show today was a VERY bizarre, but fantastic performance of the OSF's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. From the opening scene with a Tony Soprano-like characterization of Theseus and his Hippolyta sitting in white leather chairs with 8 foot tall backs, this schizophrenic romp through the Athenian forest includes a gay chorus line of "fairies" who prance and dance and fight over the costume parts they steal from the mortals invading their realm and cause the mischief that creates all the fun of this show. Totally bizarre, yet the show won me over.

The Clay Cart, an ancient Sankrit folktale, was interesting mostly due to the staging. A Brahmin, once wealthy and now poor, faces execution when he is framed for a murder. A beautiful courtesan is wooed by the King’s dumb and evil brother-in-law. The good people of the kingdom triumph in the end but not before much intrigue and moments of humor.

We had lunch at Si Casa Flores again. Leslie loves it and so do I. Clay Cart was about an hour too long and so we didn't arrive back at the room until about midnight.

Tomorrow is our last day at the festival when we'll see Our Town and August Wilson's Fences.

Day 2--Ah, Shakespeare!

Day 2 dawned bright and beautiful--a sunny day, high about 80 degrees. Beautuful!

We had breakfast here at the hotel and then headed off the Ashland. Our first play was Coriolanus, a not so well known tragedy by the master. This production was in a contemporary setting, but its lessons ring as true today as they did then. A hero returns from battle and is encouraged to become a member of the Roman Senate, but, despite all those around him encouraging him to do so, he is unwilling to lower his standards and expectations just so "the people" will accept him. The end is indeed a tragedy for him and for Rome. It definately reflects our political times. The star of the show was amazing. Others of the cast were not quite up to his equal but it was still a wonderful production.

We ran home between shows for a quick nap and ate at the Black Bear Diner in Medford.

Back to Ashland for a production of A Comedy of Errors. This show was set in the wild west days and had been turned into a musical. I know, sounds odd, but it really worked. The themes were there, the lesson to be taken away even though all the characters were dressed in the garb of a an old west town, complete with sheriff and hanging tree. Absolutely hilarious! Mistaken identity, confusion, slapstick, corny humor all reign supreme throughout this show which ended about 11 and we drove on back to a good night's sleep.

Tomorrow we see Midsummer Night's Dream and Clay Pots.