gardening

Building a Grape Arbor

By / May 23, 2014

Yesterday I wrote about my grand garden plans. One of them involved grapes and an arbor.

I left the space for one when I put posts into the ground. The idea was to have a grape hedge with an arbor. Today I bought lumber and pulled out my power tools.

The timing on this really was perfect. I had an overcast day and if I’d waited any longer the grapes would have been unweildy to work with.

It is not a particularly elegant arbor, but within only a few weeks you’re not going to be able to see much of it anyway. Next spring, when the wood has had time to weather, I’ll stain it to better match the posts to which it is attached.

It is nice to finally see one of the grand garden plans realized.

Making Friends with Flowers

By / May 22, 2014

I did not always know the names of flowers. I knew the popular ones, the ones that most people know: rose, carnation. I came to know the rest in 1999 when I was recovering from an extended illness. I needed a year of peace, I needed to emerge from a winter of illness into something green and growing. So I read gardening books and I made grand plans for how my garden beds would mature. On any day when the weather cooperated I went outside and made the acquaintance of flowers. I learned their habits, I discovered which ones faded out like guests who leave a party without staying to say goodbye. And I learned which ones were my staunch friends.

To my surprise, my best friends were not roses. I thought they would be. My middle name is Rose, I thought I would always carry that connection. We bought this house only a year before my illness when it had twenty rose bushes and my grand plans featured those bushes. I loved them enough to buy rose gloves that went up to my elbows. I tended them, clipping dead flowers all summer long and amassing piles of thorny sticks in the annual pruning. Yet where roses lived it was hard to grow anything else. If I tried to work around the bases of the rosebushes, they drew blood. I wanted many flowers, not just one.

The rosebushes are all gone now. I didn’t set out to remove them all. It was a series of decisions. This bush needed to come out because I wanted a peony. That one had died. Those were blocking passage to the neighbor’s yard and scratching kids as they ran back and forth to play. One by one they were gone. I remember them fondly. But not fondly enough to make space for new ones in my life. Instead I have friendlier, more sturdy flowers. The irises and peonies which are blooming now I planted all those years ago. I’ve neglected them a lot during the years between. They’ve spent much time swamped with weeds. Yet they’re still here. As are the lilacs, mock orange, wisteria, day lilies, bleeding hearts, and lily of the valley.

My garden now does not look much like my grand plan. The plan was beautiful, but high maintenance. What has evolved instead is mostly self sustaining. It is a green space with some flowers instead of a showy floral display space. This spring for the first time in years, I’m once again planning improvements for my garden. They are small plans, all aimed at doing extra work this year when I have help, so that I can do less work in years to come. I’m not even planning the entire summer’s work, just this week and next week. I take each week as it comes, knowing that each Saturday when I take the time to garden, that is a gift. One that I have not always had. I became a gardening because I needed to heal. Gardening still heals me. Why do I forget that?

Maturing Trees and Getting Older

By / May 17, 2014 / 2 Comments

Our trees have begun to poke their roots out of the surface of the lawn. This surfacing of roots is the natural result of having mature trees. The roots have grown in girth, just as the trunks have. They used to hide under the lawn, now they can be seen. This creates new challenges for our back garden. Where we once had to struggle to keep lawn alive in scorching summer sun, we now have protruding roots and spots where the lawn suffers because it doesn’t get very much sun. The challenges of a young yard are different from those of an older one.

I had my eyes examined about a year ago. I went because I’d noticed changes in my vision and thought that I might need new glasses. Upon hearing that I was forty, the optometrist looked at me sadly and said “The forties are not kind to eyes.” He’s correct. More and more of my friends are acquiring bifocals and reading glasses. Howard has had to adjust his work processes for the changes in his eyesight. Focusing my eyes takes far longer than it used to. Sometimes I have to hold a book in this position, other times in that one. My eyes are not the only things that I feel changing in my body. Dozens of small things work differently than they used to do.

I’m not complaining about my yard or about aging. There are advantages to mature trees and there are advantages to being forty. I’m spending much less time afraid than I used to. Most things I encounter I have the accumulated knowledge to handle with ease. This morning I was out with 13 year old Gleek weeding the tall grass out of the spot of dirt which is supposed to be an herb and vegetable garden. “How do you do that?” she asked.
“Do what?”
“Get the roots out with one pull.” I turned and looked at her. Sure enough, she kept pulling the tops off of the grass stalks while leaving the roots. My hands have been pulling weeds for so long that they know exactly where on a stalk I should grab, how hard to pull, and that slight twist that breaks the roots free. I don’t know when I learned it. I didn’t even realize it was a skill until I saw that Gleek didn’t have it. Being forty is like that all the time. Hundreds of things have become so easy for me that I’m hardly aware that they are complicated.

When the gardening work is done for the day, I walk in my yard. I trace the length of roots along the surface of the grass. One of the roots runs for more than six feet along the surface of the ground until it disappears under the fence into my neighbor’s yard. I can see the places where vines have grown through the fence and are breaking planks apart. I see the lattice we attached to the wall fifteen years ago, which is now a crumbling ruin around the trunks of the vines it once supported. I look at all these plants that I put into the ground. I now get the array of blooms that I pictured long ago when I planted a tiny wisteria stick and hoped that it would not die.

I don’t know what is coming for these plants. Possibly the roots will begin to trip people. The trees reach over the house now. Sometime soon we may have damage to repair because a tree begins to die, or begins to fight with the house. I can look ahead and try to imagine, just as I pictured grown trees when I dug holes for baby ones. Of course when I pictured canopy overhead, I didn’t picture roots underfoot, yet I get both. The future I’m going to get will be different than I can imagine today. I will be different. Like the trees, I am going to continue changing and maturing. I’ll need different glasses. My body will change. My capabilities will alter. Some of that I’m going to dislike, just as I get annoyed with my eyes right now. Yet I’m sure that continuing to age will continue to bring me unexpected gifts along with the annoyances.

For today, I walk my yard, tend my garden, and try to make decisions that will be good for years to come.

Digging out Weeds

By / May 10, 2014


This was my front flower bed at 9am this morning. Grass has always been a challenge in this bed. I’ve fought with it for years, never quite able to eradicate it because I was reluctant to really dig up the bed for fear of hurting hidden spring bulbs. Then I had two or three summers where I did very little gardening. The grass began to win and this year there were no spring blooms. I decided it was time to take a shovel and dig everything up. When I began digging, my hope was to dig it out and buy some flowers to plant to make things pretty. Within a few minutes I could tell that the grass was so pervasive and wide-spread that the only chance I had to really get rid of it is if I employ a bare earth policy. I need to dig up this bed every few weeks all summer long to be able to find all the hidden grass and morning glory roots.

Step one is mostly complete.

You can see that I left the peonies, a couple of day lilies and some flax down at the end near the rock. These are good strong perennials and they are the basis for the flower bed that this will become. For this year they’ll just sit there surrounded by dirt. If I succeed in my war of attrition on the grass, then when cool weather arrives in the fall, I will plant some more perennials. I have all summer to think about which ones I want.

As I was digging, I thought about this bare earth approach in other areas of my life. There is often a stage in creating something beautiful that is downright ugly and a whole lot of work. Last year was a bare earth year for our family as we cleared away lots of mess and reconfigured some relationships. This year the kids are poised to bloom. Right now my novel is in a bare earth phase. I’m just working and it feels like there is no way that it can ever be a thing of beauty. But sometimes it takes a summer of digging weeds before there can be a summer of flowers.

Taming the Garden

By / May 3, 2014 / 1 Comment

Somewhere in the years, Mother’s Day became and emotionally complicated holiday. It didn’t used to be. I try not to make it so now, but sometimes it is because my children and husband want to do something nice for me and I want to let them, but I don’t want them to feel obligated. Sometimes it slides by without a ripple and all is happy. Other years it is a fraught day with emotions other than happiness and contentment, even though all of the scripts state that Mother’s Day is supposed to be a day when Mom is happy. This year I saw the holiday coming. I also know that money is tight and so the last thing that would feel happy is extra expense. I sat everyone down yesterday and declared that what I really want for Mother’s Day is for our yard to not be an absolute wreck. I was surprised at how willing the kids were to go along with this plan. I think they liked having a clear goal.

This morning the work began with clipping and clearing. We broke out the mower for the first time and trimmed back various bushes and vines. The pom pom spruce got sheared back. We stared at the apricot tree and the pear tree, but both have gotten so tall that we’re going to need some sort of a pole saw to give them the trimming that they need. Four hours of work across five people and we’ve cleared away a significant mess. This evening some of the dry branches will have a second use as fuel for our fire pit. There will be smores. Next week will all be hands and knees work. We’ll need to get down into the flower beds and pull out all the extra grass. I want to clear the dirt enough that I can sprinkle seeds. I’d love to plant flowers that will bloom this year, but I don’t have the funds for that. I can do seeds though. I have a big stock of them that have accumulated over the years.

At one moment during the morning I stood and watched my kids at work. They were all focused on their tasks at hand, which is not at all how family work days used to go. They functioned as a crew and got lots of work done. Then afterward they did more things together. I have to remember that we play together more happily when we’ve worked together first.

It would be so lovely to spend this summer glad every time I step outside my door instead of sad and guilty. That would be a lovely gift indeed.

Tending and Blooming

By / April 23, 2014

I used to be a gardener. It is still a thing that I love and someday I will again make time to tend the ground and grow flowers. Right now it is simply not as important to me as a dozen other projects that I have. I find time to get outside and beat back the weeds, but that is not the same as being a focused gardener. A tended garden is a thing of beauty. My garden is a wilderness where plants have a survival-of-the-fittest battle with only occasional intervention from me. I’m pleased that sometimes the flowers win.

Every year Thanksgiving Point Gardens hosts a tulip festival. I always intend to go. One year I even scheduled an outing to go, but then one of my kids picked that day to pretend to be sick. All of the other years, at least five or six of them, I simply missed the window. Somehow the two weeks in April when the tulips are in full bloom always were busy. I would look up at the end of the month and realize that I’d missed my chance yet again.

This morning, for the first time ever, I didn’t miss it. My friend said “Do you want to go?” and I said “Yes.” So we both ditched our piles of work and we wandered the gardens.

Beauty can be found wild, in untended corners, or even wide open spaces. Yet there is an art to a tended garden, I walk there and I know that it is loved because someone had to get down on hands and knees and dig. They had to get dirty, tired, and sweaty to make sure that all goes well. A tended garden takes a sacrifice of time. I’ve spent my last few years tending other things. This year I’m watching my children bloom when last year was life torn up, mud, and despair. Sometimes tending something is like that, you have to make a big mess before beauty can happen. I’ve also tended many books and last week I got to see them arrayed in a booth where others could see the results of all those invisible hours. My garden is full of weeds, but my life is full of things that are beautiful because of the effort I’ve put into them. So perhaps I am still a gardener, just not of flowers right now.

I Found Time to Garden

By / July 13, 2013 / 1 Comment

The casual passerby out for a walk would not look at my flower beds and intuit that I am a person who enjoys weeding. Surely a person who enjoys pulling weeds would not let crab grass grow waist high until the flowering plants are nearly choked to death. Yet I do. The trouble is that I forget that weeding is an activity which makes me happy. I wait for the right conjunction of weather, available time, and energy instead of arranging so that those things will overlap.

This evening I rescued my baby butterfly bush from the grass. I am quite happy to see that it has not died. I planted it last fall, but I feared that the cold winter had killed it and then I worried that neglect would do the same. But now it stands in a space of bare earth, putting forth its first flowers. Perhaps next week I’ll be able to rescue the peonies and day lilies. In late August I hope to begin putting new plants into the ground. For once I would like to end the gardening season with the weeds in retreat. I hope for that most years, but perhaps this is the year that I will succeed. If I can just get the plants into the ground, then some of them will thrive despite my neglect. I like that about plants.

The Trees I Planted

By / June 9, 2013 / 1 Comment


The best time to plant a tree is ten years ago. The next best time is today.

Fifteen years ago I dug a hole in the ground and planted that tree in the picture. It was a tiny little thing that I had to defend from the children and the potential ravages of weed whackers. There was one spring where aphids threatened to kill the entire tree, so we released legions of ladybugs on it. We planted many trees that first year in the house because we knew that someday we wanted to have shade. Life changed and shifted. We spent less energy landscaping and far more creating books. While we were not paying attention, the trees grew. They got big enough for Gleek to climb them. The shade spread to cover most of the lawn.

Yesterday I went in search of a hammock for Link. He’s wistfully asked for one more than once, and given his current doctor’s instructions to avoid sitting as much as possible, it seemed like a good time to add lounging space in the back garden. I’d seen the hammocks and stands at IKEA, they still had the hammocks, but not the stands. I brought the hammock home and strung it between a pair of trees. That tiny maple sapling now bears the weight of two kids without bending. The act of fifteen years ago blesses our lives today because I planted a tree in the right place.

Here at the Tayler house this summer represents a pause before things finish changing. All of our lives will look quite different ten years from now. I could drive myself crazy trying to figure out which things I should plant in our lives right now so that they’ll bless us later. I remember agonizing over where to plant the trees all those years ago. I pondered bush placement. I paced off expected shade radii. Some of the trees that we planted later died. Other trees I could wish in slightly different locations. It is hard to know what our lives will need ten years from now. Instead of trying to plan all of it, I just need to plant many things and see which ones flourish. Also I consult with the master gardener and listen to His instructions.

For now I’ll be out back in the hammock, breathing the scents of honeysuckle and mock orange, while swinging gently in the shade of my trees.

Things of Today

By / September 8, 2012

Wake up earlier than I wanted to fix breakfast. Birthday boy requested waffles.

Drop Kiki off to take the ACT test.

Harvest two giant batches of grapes. Realize that there are just as many left on the vines.

Put first set of grapes into sink full of water to find all the hiding bugs.

Mow lawn.

Abandon lawn mower and flee when bumping Winston our gargoyle reveals that yellow jackets have taken up residence in his hollow interior.

Warn all family members and neighbors to not go near the infested gargoyle.

Retrieve lawnmower and finish all the parts of the lawn that are not near Winston.

Pick grapes off of vines. Smash grapes. Boil grapes. Strain grape juice out of skins and seeds. Put jars of juice into fridge.

Repeat.

Let kids eat left overs for lunch and microwaved frozen food for dinner.

Figure out that tying a rope to the gargoyle’s head will let us tip him over from a safe distance. Declare that 8 pm will be the killing hour for yellow jackets.

Contemplate picking more grapes. Decide not to.

Wander over to watch the yellow jackets. Think how cool and amazing they are and how they really can not be allowed to nest right next to the kids play area.

Pick two boxes of pears so that they can begin to ripen. Plan to make pear butter next week.

Stare at nothing for awhile.

Make sure all the kids are indoors, then pull the rope to tip Winston over. Go inside to observe the cloud of angry stinging bugs from behind glass. Watch Howard spray them from thirty feet away.

Summer score: Taylers = 3, Stinging bug nests = 0 Hope we can just call that score good for the summer.

Run to store for more wasp spray. Also because Link’s Sunday pants no longer fit.

Realize on the drive home that I am perhaps more tired than I ought to be while driving. Arrive home safe anyway.

Finish straining the last of the grapes. Realize our fridge is now completely full of jars of grape juice and that I’ll have to make jam very soon. But not tonight.

Tell kids to put themselves to bed.

Wander outside with a flashlight to view yellow jacket carnage. Notice how beautiful the nest is. Really a marvel of nature, which one can only observe once all the winged defenders are dead.

Tell kids that while going to bed and reading in bed are similar, they are not the same thing.

Write words about the day. Eat food. Go to bed.

Grape Season

By / September 1, 2012 / 1 Comment

When you plant a dozen tiny grape sprouts in the ground, they do not much look like a hedge of vines. Then when you have to baby them through the summer and three quarters of them die anyway, it is discouraging. But there comes a time six or seven summers later when huge vines threaten to over take the maple tree and have killed a bush by sneakily twining inside it and stealing all the sunshine. Those huge vines hide so many grapes that you stand in your kitchen, after having washed, plucked, smashed, cooked, and strained grapes all day long, yet there are still as many grapes still on the vines as you brought in the house. Then you wonder why on earth you planted so many grape plants. But it is hard to picture that day when they are tiny. Of course you’re also going to have grape jelly for the entire rest of the year, so there’s that.