Tall Phlox

Day 287: The Tall Phlox standing three feet high on the far side of the Barren Wasteland comes under the umbrella of "don't blame me." I'm sure that at least 95% of my readers know my opinion of the colour pink by now, and while the Phlox is bright enough to be allowed special dispensation, it still falls within the ranks of "pink" and therefore is not one of my favourite features. However, it came with the house and for a long time, it and the Bergenia (also pink) were the only things I could get to grow there. Now it must be said that the former owners of this property had one of the poorest senses of colour I have ever seen, and they applied it lavishly to the interior of the house as well. The living room drapes and carpet were a mix of orange and a dirty light brown. The walls of the living room had also been orange at some point, but were apparently painted over in universal eggshell for the sale of the property. The backsplash in the kitchen was covered with contact paper (also with an orange design), countertops coordinating in a brown-and-orange pebble, and the linoleum was a brown my mother would have called "sick calf" in polite company, and something far more rurally evocative to those who were more accustomed to her descriptive vocabulary. It was several years before I managed to eliminate completely the orange/brown theme, and I was never so happy as the day when the last of it went down the road in the remodelers' truck, destined for the dump. The garden has been harder to "repaint." I cannot bear to destroy a living plant other than invasives, and especially not one which grows where nothing else will take hold. I'll just have to live with pink when it pops up in the Barren Wasteland.

The Barren Wasteland

Day 297: Readers and friends will have heard me refer to the Barren Wasteland as a section of my garden, perhaps without understanding the history which brought about its naming. When I moved onto this property some thirty years ago, the flower beds had been let go for so long that they were entirely grassed over and filled with weeds. My first horticultural project was to clean them out and salvage what I could. To that end, a friend and I excavated to a depth of 18", delving up unidentifiable roots, pieces of broken glass, old wire and the occasional rock of grapefruit-sized dimension. The roots were returned to their beds, and no one was any more surprised than I when peonies and delphiniums shot up the following year. But the flower beds were not my only focus. I wanted a vegetable garden. A forested belt to the west excluded digging up the back yard for the simple reason that it received very little light after 2 PM, not an ideal condition for sun-loving crops. The front yard was out of the question and at the time, the side yard was partly covered by a concrete patio, ruling it out as well. The 10'-wide strip between the exterior kitchen wall and the garage seemed to be my only option, so I set about digging and sifting, weeding and hoeing and, at long last, planting. Bottom line: the only thing it would grow was green beans. Not lettuce, not zucchini, not radishes and definitely not corn.

Whether the fault lay in the nutrient-poor soil or in the hoodoo which customarily overshadows any attempts I make with respect to vegetables, I can't say. I suspect it was a bit of both. The patch became known as the Barren Wasteland and returned to weeds when I resigned myself to eating store-bought veg. A few years after I conceded the match, the gardening bug bit me again. This time, I pulled weeds and threw down wildflower seed from a mix. I mean, surely something will grow, right? It did. California Poppies and Yarrow filled the space and threatened to invade the rest of the county. Then I noticed a few oddments: Deptford Pinks, Wallflower. I pulled the more aggressive plants from around them in the hopes that they'd fill in. Rudbeckia seed spread naturally from my flower beds, providing some welcome tall colour. Seeing its success, I transplanted some Echinacea. It was happy there. Pigsqueak (Bergenia) and tall Phlox surfaced from the previous owner's garden, a bit too pink for my tastes but I welcomed them nevertheless, adding Rose Campion to keep them company. There's a wild Currant in there somewhere, a treat for the hummingbirds when it's in flower, and the Yarrow and Poppies persist in the "understory" despite my best efforts to eradicate them. I still call it the Barren Wasteland, although it's anything but. Today, that impoverished strip of land is largely populated with tall colour which spills out of the hoops I use to confine it, homesteaders succeeding despite the difficult conditions of their environment.

Barren Wasteland

Day 287: I call it the Barren Wasteland: the ten-foot wide space between my house and garage. When I first moved here, I thought to turn it into a vegetable garden, working around the concrete and wood dead spaces which cover the pit where my water system's captive-air tank lives. Little did I know that nothing but weeds would grow in that soil...not radishes, not zucchini, and definitely not corn or peas or tomatoes. A few years' experiments with bush beans yielded rather sickly crops, so after several attempts at trying to draw blood from the proverbial turnip, I threw in the towel and let the Barren Wasteland go. Then one year I hit on the bright idea of making it a wildflower garden. I bought a mix of seeds "designed for the Pacific Northwest" without paying too much attention to the content. It came up mostly California poppies which, despite being pretty en masse, are undesirable for their tendency to go out of control and into monoculture. My vision of a rampant English-garden style space refused to go according to plan until I relocated a vigorous Rudbeckia to one corner, apparently providing just the "lift" the Wasteland needed to take off on its own. I even found that some of the wildflower seeds germinated long after they'd been sown, delicate Deptford Pinks shooting up here and there accompanied by orange Wallflowers and the occasional Tall Phlox from some prior point in history. I added Rose Campion (purloined from a friend's yard) and more Rudbeckias, even a wild currant. Little by little, the Barren Wasteland filled in. Today, it's far from barren, but the name persists for this "wild space" where colour now crowds out the weeds. I'm happy with it, even though I am still pulling California poppies.