The Cancer Survivor's Garden - The Ponds

A water feature in the garden is touted as being “a must” for every garden.  There are many reasons for that.  When I got to the point of filling our first pond, a dragon fly showed up and buzzed over the small puddle of water and then buzzed past me as if to say, “Hurry up, will you.  You’ve been at this all day.”  The birds were into the new pond before it was full. To say a pond attracts wildlife is an understatement.

I got sick before I finished building the second and third ponds.  The plastic liners are sunk into the ground but are not edged.  The birds and frogs haven’t noticed.  They moved in and are content with the way things are.

In order to keep mosquitoes from infesting the ponds, I installed goldfish.  I avoided Koi because I read that blue herons eat Koi, but not your standard goldfish.  Apparently, Harry, the great blue heron didn’t read the same book I read.  Goldfish are just fine with him/her. 

I built the ponds close to the house so I can see them from the sofa. The antics of all the birds around the ponds have entertained me for hours.  My hubby keeps insisting that I should chase the blue heron away instead of photographing it.  I don’t think the heron is going to be permanently intimidated if I run out and wave my arms and yell at it, so I might as well take some wonderful pictures. 

I can’t accuse the heron of eating all the goldfish by himself.  A kingfisher visits our pond too.  I got some nice photos of the kingfisher.  He is a little more shy about being photographed than Harry. He’s very efficient at fishing.  At one point after the goldfish had bred we had a couple hundred fish in the big pond.  The birds got them all. 

Each year, I end up stocking the ponds with several dozen goldfish.  This year, I have a breeding pair of goldfish who have escaped the birds, snakes and raccoons.  I hope to have more baby fish.  I will still have to restock the smaller ponds. 

My own ducks love the ponds.  They have their own kiddy pool near their pen, but the deeper ponds in the front are their favorite hang-out.  We also have a pair of wild ducks that visit our ponds in the spring.  I enjoy watching them come in for a landing and always hope they will dine on the slugs in the garden. 

Yesterday while we were eating dinner, our domestic ducks were in the pond.  The wild ducks arrived to find the pond occupied.  Mr. Wild Duck immediately left in a huff.  Mrs. Wild Duck looked over my three attractive male ducks and settled in for a visit while wiggling her tail suggestively.  She stayed for about fifteen minutes before leaving to join her mate. 

 The ponds are relatively low maintenance.  They grow a slimy plant in the hot summer.  If I pull the slimy plant out, it makes a nice mulch and plant food for the roses.  If the slimy plant doesn’t get pulled out, it disintegrates during the winter.  It may help the goldfish to hide from predators.  As far as I can see, the ponds are healthy with almost no maintenance.  They look a little ugly in August, but we can’t all be at our best all the time.  If I had the energy, I might hook up my small pump to water my roses with the nutrient-rich pond water in August, while filling the ponds with a garden hose.  On the other hand, the ponds work with no maintenance other that occasionally installing new plants and restocking with fish.

Lies - Being a Nice Girl

Having written a novel with a theme of lies at it’s core, I keep coming back to the question of how much of what we believe might really be a lie.  People who have read my book like to bring me comments about the lies they have uncovered in their lives.

Lies are hard to detect when they are about our basic belief system concerning the nature of the world.  I grew up during the civil rights movement. When I asked questions about the movement, my parents tried to explain, but found it challenging to teach a child why some people believed a lie.  While my parents were busy teaching me that some people believe lies, they were also busy teaching me a lie.    

The lie I grew up with was if you are nice to others, they will be nice to you.  This is a major tenet of the whole set of nice girl rules.  Of course, one problem is the reverse of the rule: If people are cruel to you, it is because you are not nice.  It is the reverse rule that is devastating, induces the most guilt and allows us to blame victims.

When I first contemplated writing about lies, I thought that writing about the nice girl rules and calling them lies would sound cynical.  Yesterday a friend, Mary, called to tell me about an incident with another friend of ours being bullied at work.  I commented, “It is so frustrating to see something like this happen to Helen.  She is such a nice person.”  I still believed the lie despite ample evidence over the years that being nice to others does not guarantee us immunity from cruelty.

Mary told me about reading Elaine Aron’s book The Highly Sensitive Person At Work.  She explained that Aron described the victim of bullying as being a nice person.  Ah, nice people get bullied?  It actually makes sense.  Nice people are seen as less likely to strike back or defend themselves.  Bluntly put, if you are nice to others, some people will see you as weak and attempt to bully you.  I can deal with that.

Now, we get to the truth and can rewrite the rules.  Being a nice person and treating others with respect and kindness is a worthy value in and of itself.  However, if you choose to adopt this value, others may view you as weak or unwilling to defend yourself.  Occasionally the nice person will encounter people who are willing to be cruel because they believe they won’t be called on their behavior.

Looking at the truth sets us free to be more deliberate in our own behavior.  Yes, I choose to treat others as I want to be treated.  Some will not reciprocate.  When someone else chooses to be cruel, it does not mean I am not a nice person or that I am responsible for creating their behavior.  Their cruelty means that they have a problem that has nothing to do with me.  I can still be a nice person and walk away or defend myself as I choose.  

Cancer Survivor’s Garden – The Staff

            Because I had an income from my flower business, I had enough money to hire help with my garden when I couldn’t do it all myself.  The first person I hired did a reasonable job of expanding a new bed.  When I asked him to weed the white garden, he disappeared and never came back. The white bed wasn’t that bad--yet.

            I hired a young girl who liked garden work.  She couldn’t tell the difference between a flower and a weed.  She couldn’t do the heavy chores.  She wanted to be paid the same as someone who knew what they were doing.  When she didn’t show up for work, I refused to call her again.

            A landscape company sent me a flyer.  I called them.  They came out with a team of people and did a great job.  They knew the difference between garden plants and weeds.  They were fast and thorough.  The recession hit and they went out of business. 

            I tried several more people who would show up for work, maybe, if they were in the mood, and the work wasn’t too hard.

            Finally, the local garden store started contracting out garden help.  Their people show up on time.  They do heavy chores.  The workers, they send out, know the difference between weeds and common flowers.  They’ve weeded out some of my rare plants.  On the other hand, Carlos throws the hated snakes over the fence into the woods.  I will continue to hire them and keep labels on rare plants.

            Nobody I’ve hired can weed to my satisfaction.  I like to take my garden fork and loosen the top six to eight inches of soil.  I can then lift out the weeds with some chance of getting the root. 

            Alas, the staff likes to get down on the ground with a hand held cultivator and break the weeds off an inch below the surface.  The gardens look great for about two weeks then the weeds sprout from the healthy root that is still in the ground. 

            Still, the men I hire from the garden store do a great job with cutting back brush, weed-eating and hauling compost.  I have them chop the weeds out of the driveway, which is hard work.  It does look nice for a few weeks when they are done.

            It is expensive to hire help in the garden.  I am paying twenty-five dollars an hour for someone who will show up on time.  I’m told I could save money by hiring this person or that.  It saves a great deal of money when the help doesn’t come to work, but it doesn’t get the chores done, when they need to be done.

            There is one other person I might class as staff, my husband.  Most of the time I was sick, he had all he could do to work, and take care of me.  He did try to help in the garden.  He is willing to mow with the riding mower.  He cut down a bed of daffodils before they were ready to be mowed, and I lost about five hundred daffodils.  I’ve given up asking him to use the weed-eater.  He spells sudden death for perennials, yet seems afraid to cut the grass to the ground around a raised bed.  As for weeding, my husband has one method he learned as a young boy watching his father turn over the vegetable bed.  He will turn the top layer of dirt over, hiding the perennial weeds until they reorient themselves and pop through the surface again.

            Hubby can be counted on to do some routine chores.  I can occasionally get him to clean the duck yard.  He built me a new two-foot high brick bed, and laid a brick retaining wall along the driveway.  He will haul compost with much grumbling.  As garden staff, he is acceptable if I stand right beside him, which was not realistic when I was sick. 

            Hiring someone to work in the garden is just a hit and miss proposition.  Some people get lucky with a hiring a general handyman or an individual with a yard maintenance business.  My grandmother used to hire someone who kept her gardens beautiful.  She stood over him the whole time he was there and made certain the job got done right.  I am not that type of person.  When I was sick, I couldn’t stand over the staff.  I’ve had the best luck hiring the guys from the local garden store or the landscape business with a large staff.  I hope soon to be able to do more myself.

Cancer Survivor’s Garden – The Enchanted Forest

We have a quarter acre of woods outside the deer fence that we call The Enchanted Forest.  We have never done much with it.  It is home to Western Red Cedar, Douglas Fir, Western Hemlock, Pacific Madrone and a Pacific Dogwood. 

This whole end of our island was logged off in the nineteen twenties.  The Douglas Fir grew back way too thick.  The property really did not have an understory.  We looked out on a quarter acre of tree trunks.  When we moved in, we thinned out some of the spindliest trees.  I never got around to planting an understory because I was busy inside the deer fence. 

We finally decided to work on The Enchanted Forest.  I was sick by this time, but thought that I would surely get better soon.  We had already contracted to have some of the sickest trees and dead trees cut when my biopsy results came back.  We ignored the forest.  The tree cutter came and took down the worst of the trees but did not clean up the mess he created.  Next, we had The Three Harsh Winters.  The ice and snow brought down more limbs and a couple small trees.  The Pacific Madrone got sick, all their leaves turned black and huge sections died and fell.

While the trees were shedding heavily, the local salal grew fantastically vigorously.  The stuff was four feet tall, thick and matted.  It was also diseased.  I couldn’t use it in floral arrangements because of the nasty black spots on the leaves. 

The tree cutter left the perimeter trail cluttered.  The First Harsh Winter left the trail impassable.  By this winter we could not get more than a few feet into The Enchanted Forest.  It came to remind me of Tolkien’s Old Forest.  It would not let us enter and was ready to attack the house.  As we investigated, it became obvious that the whole forest floor was covered with crisscrossed limbs and tree trunks.  It was a fire hazard.

Our house sits on the edge of about two hundred acres of forest.  Occasionally we do dry out enough for forest fires.  We decided that as the first buffer between the forest and our neighborhood of homes, we really needed to clean up the mess. 

We called in the people who cleared when we built the house.  The poor man looked over our little quarter acre. Being experienced with the local forests, he gave us a bid based on hauling off four huge truck-loads of debris.  Folks, he hauled ten huge loads of branches and salal out of that quarter acre.  He finally came back with his huge blade and smoothed the rough ground into a level park.  When I look out on my beautiful parkland and watch the shadows of the trees on the ground, I feel as if the restoration of my garden has begun.

Cancer Survivor’s Garden – What Died

The most important part of the What-Died topic is that I survived, which means my garden will survive.  While I was sick, it just so happened that we had three unusually harsh winters in a row.  The harsh winters, combined with neglect, decimated parts of my garden.

What-Died includes the whole east border.  First of all the invaders took out some young shrubs including some viburnums, and a mock orange.  I had brunnera and hostas in a shady area that was eaten by ferns and trailing blackberry.  Even about half of the daffodils died out. 

The biggest tragedy in the east border was the eucalyptus tree.  Plant adventurer and gardener extraordinaire Dan Hinkley tells us that the harsh winters killed twenty-six eucalyptus at Windcliff.  There is a difference between his garden and mine.  His garden has two healthy men to tend to things such as dead trees.  They removed their dead eucalyptus.  My tree still stands barren and broken but not alone.

I really need to write a tragic love story about my eucalyptus and acacia.  I planted a supposedly hardy acacia beside my eucalyptus.  It was damaged in the first hard winter.  Both plants died to the ground in the second winter and they died completely the third winter. 

I am convinced that the eucalyptus and acacia had a special relationship.  The acacia was planted on the southwest side of the eucalyptus in order for it to receive full sun. That plant grew toward the shaded northeast and the eucalyptus.  The eucalyptus could be forgiven for growing southwest toward full sun, but it was thickest and healthiest where its branches mingled with the acacia.  I am certain there was something about those two that caused the acacia to grow away from the sun.  They died a tragic, frozen, icy death and stand together in my garden with their branches still touching, lovers in death as well as life.

Onward through the east border, we come to the perimeter, walking trail.  This trail followed the fence line around the perimeter of my property.  Most of the trail meandered through Douglas Fir woods.   It was a peaceful place to walk.  My border gardens shielded the path from the house.  The path was lined with ferns, salal, huckleberry, and elderberries.  The sun was never too hot.  Alas, the blackberries invaded while my back was turned.  The native plants grew into the open trail and choked out any sign of a path.  My beautiful, peaceful trail is gone.

Leaving the east border and walking trail, we enter the sunken garden.  This is the lowest place on the property.  This area is open to the south so it gets good sunlight. It warms up the earliest of any area in my garden in the spring.  It is sheltered from the wind.  I planted daffodils to come on early in the sunken garden.  I made a bed for roses, dahlias and lilies on the south-facing slope of the sunken garden.  The daffodils fell to the riding mower when hubby didn’t realize they should not be cut down yet.  The dahlias didn’t get dug in the fall so they froze in our third hard winter.  The blackberries and wisteria have tried to choke out the roses.  Through this tangled mess the lilies grow six feet tall and bloom--filling the whole sunken garden with their fragrance.

I could sing a long mournful song about the perennials that didn’t make it, monarda, penstemen, holly hock and phlox, Jacobs ladder, verbena,  astilbe, and sage, clematis, and salvia .

I lost more than my perennials and flowers.  One of the asparagus beds suffered a severe dandelion attack.  The dandelions have crowded out and choked the asparagus.  Those crowns that didn’t get choked out died when we disturbed them repeatedly trying to get the dandelion out of their bed.

This tale of death and destruction could end on a sad note for all my lost darlings.  I am at heart a gardener.  I will go out and buy new things I haven’t tried before and pop them into all the empty places in my garden.  I am scouring friends’ gardens for just a few starts here and there.  I am not quite ready to remove eucalyptus and acacia just yet. They will remain as they were for a few years yet.

Cancer Survivor’s Garden – Design

 

When I was designing my garden I didn't ask myself what it would look like when it had been neglected for three or more years.  I’d read books on design.  I’d been to lectures at the Northwest Garden and Flower Show.  I can follow instructions.

I designed most of my pathways wide enough for the garden cart.  The joke at the garden show was to design the pathways wide enough for the staff.  I didn’t need a staff—then.  I did design my pathways wide enough for the garden cart, in most places.  The wider paths will allow us to mow them with the riding mower.  They are not a problem.

I intended for my paths to be gravel.  I put down landscape fabric and four inches or more of gravel.  In some places I saw no need for my gravel paths to be wide enough for my widest garden cart.  These are the places where I will have to completely redo the beds.

The gravel paths were great for about the first three years then grass and dandelions began to creep in.  I fought bravely, then I couldn’t fight.  The grass and dandelions completely occupied my pathways.  The narrower paths were wide enough for the push mower but not the riding lawnmower.  They harbored the crab grass that invaded my raised beds.  They bred the dandelions that went to seed and grew in my nice loose fertile planting beds.

About twice a year, we hired the workers from the local garden store to come and clean the gravel paths.  This was expensive and did not last long.  Within a month the crab grass and dandelions were back.

My garden is a great testimony to the importance of good garden design.  Where I designed well, the structure and design have kept those areas looking respectable.  When the garden workers come, they can make those places look fantastic. 

Those parts of the garden that were never constructed as they ought to have been are a mess.  They take hours and hours to clean up.  In some places the best that can be done is to hire help.  It will be expensive to clean up and rebuild the mess created from neglect and poor design. 

I can promise you that as I rebuild all pathways will be wide enough for the riding mower.  The beds that create my labyrinth will need to be completely redone.  I will raise them higher.  I will eliminate small paths between the beds by running some beds together and relocating some beds to make the pathways wider.

When I say I will do all this heavy work, I really mean the very expensive workers from the garden store will do the heavy work.  It would have been so much cheaper to do the job right the first time.

Cancer Survivor’s Garden – Adaptations

 

            My flower farm means a great deal to me because I love fresh flowers in the house.  In addition to flowers for myself, I want to share the joy and spirituality of a bouquet of fresh flowers on the dining room table.  However, I am concerned about what is on those fresh flowers.  The little white spiders and occasional baby slug don’t bother me much.  On the other hand, have those flowers been sprayed with a fungicide that is likely to rub off on your hands or simply evaporate into the air you breathe?  Mine haven’t.  It is important to me that my customers be able to purchase a healthy, locally grown product.

            For three years, I was unable to do much gardening, but I still wanted my flowers.  How could I manage?  Thank heavens for containers!  I bought some large, cheap, plastic storage tubs at the hardware and asked my hubby to drill holes in the bottom.  I planted hundreds of bulbs in my tubs.  I intended to empty the tubs into the gardens after the first season so the bulbs could naturalize.  They are still in the tubs.  The daffodils are coming up thick and the anemones are showing signs of being ready to bloom.

            When the plastic swimming pool we used for the ducks got a crack in the bottom, I pulled it into a sunny spot in the yard, filled it with dirt and planted it to annuals.  It is now the home of my Rudbeckia Prairie Sun. 

            Any large pot I could find became home to flowers for cutting.  Large pots seem to be a fad lately.  I’ve found many lovely pots for a very reasonable price.  I usually plant bulbs in them.  They put on a long season show of daffodils to lilies.  I might tuck a Canna in each pot this year.

            In addition to my found objects for planting beds, I managed to hire workers from our local garden store to build a deep, raised, brick bed for me.  It is amazing how much I can grow in a ten by four foot bed when it is raised up with two feet of good soil inside. 

            I discovered that crab grass and dandelions easily took over my eight-inch high raised beds in the garden.  The deeper twenty-four to thirty inch beds are easier to keep weeded.  They have not been attacked by the crab grass.  It is easy to get all of the dandelion root out of the light soil in the deeper bed. 

            We have another container bed of sorts.  I planted a large garden in the middle of our cul-de-sac.  It is surrounded by driveway.  Nothing creeps in from the outside because the outside is compacted gravel.  The native soil in that spot was decent.  I build it up with layers of straw and imported soil.  This bed holds water well.  I’ve planted the bed with bulbs and tall grasses.  It has year-round interest and produces another thousand or so daffodils in the spring.

            My plan for the future is to build more deep raised beds.  I may even abandon some of the eight-inch tall raised beds.  The taller beds are easier on my back for weeding.  They grow healthy plants because the things I want to grow are not competing for root room with invaders from outside.  I will continue to use containers.  I need to devise some method of trimming the grass around my raised beds.  Perhaps I should get a sheep.