Over the past few years, I’ve been too busy making new gardens to actually find the time to write about them. We’re only now at a point where I can sit down to share something of the bigger picture.
The unspoken reality is we’ve been immersed in making a series of garden spaces from scratch, diverse in both scale and habitat, but all linked by this idea of wildscaping. Up till now, only friends and visitors have seen fragments of the work in progress.
It was a coming together of people, plants, and pond life in our reimagined log cabin universe. It was an all-outdoor declaration of love and an occasion for my long-time girlfriend Troy and I to seal the deal with a ring.
It was our Big Day in the Country. And we’d been planning a pond-side wedding (and I’d been weeding the plantings) for months.
I had plans to write a post to unveil my new two-year old garden. It was going to be whimsical, poetic yet measured, with a splash of horticultural detail to bring life to the inner story.
Well, scrap all that.
Instead, I woke this morning and walked down to the pond to find that my garden had been transported to another dimension.
Suspended in a halo of fog, the plants beckoned forth in perfect stillness, and I stood there, spellbound.
It feels like forever since I’ve been able to post photos of an actual garden of my own.
There’s been ceaseless rain in a cool extended spring, helping my young woodland garden find its feet. I’ve been planting up adjoining areas and getting busy with my Dutch hoe while watching this section burst to life.
Up in our neck of the northern woods, you catch the first signs of spring in the mosses on the forest trails. On a dank cloudy day, they appear to glow like emerald velvet clouds come down to earth to hug the rocks.
By the time you hit mid-April, life has erupted in micro with the first ephemerals and sedges poking their heads up from the tapestry of the woodland floor.
