Bulletin - Summer 1979 - North American Rock Garden Society

THE EVOLUTION OF A GARDEN...And GardenerFLORENCE FREESeattle, Washington"Be it ever so humble —!" Whatcan give a deeper sense of satisfactionthan moving into a brand new house,soon to be a home, destined to bethe one and only home. The early snapshotof our small daughter leaning overthe porch rail viewing a recentlybulldozed lot sprouting a vigorous cropof pigweed shows a little brick housesitting high on its concrete foundationin a row of equally bare little houses,all on fifty foot lots. The high foundationmakes possible a garage underthe house with an excavated drivewayboring down to it. A dream house,no less!In the thirty years since that picturewas taken, not only a garden, but agardener has evolved.I made it a point to be home theexciting day that the man came toput in the lawn. He brought up aquestion which I had never considered.How wide did I want the shrubberyborder around the house to be? Intenton getting the dirt covered up as soonas possible to keep it out of the house,I thought two inches would be aboutright. It was the first miscalculation.The lawn has been shrinking ever since,away from the house and the gardenperimeter. However, I am now curbingthat tendency. A small garden, full ofa wide variety of plant material, needsa generous amount of lawn to bringcohesion and serenity to the scene.There was never a blueprint forthis garden. It just happened. It evolved.I fell in love with a plant, I founda place for it. It outgrew its place,I moved it. It got too big to move,something else had to go. Until finallythe decisions were not mine, I justdid what the plant dictated.And a lot of my most valued plantmaterial was either a gift or cameto me by chance. For instance, a happychance brought a seedling of Cornusnuttallii to my garden via a bird inthe peach tree. In the nick of timeI recognized the little stranger for whatit was and instead of weeding it outI moved it to a corner of the gardenwhere it could expand into the treeit was destined to be. Now it is thirtyfeet high and so dominates that cornerof the garden with its shade and rootsthat the vegetable garden has had togo-Another bird brought me a seedlingmahonia which persisted in a clumpof blueberries in spite of my best effortsto weed it out. I finally changed mytactics and decided to grow the mahoniainstead of the blueberries. It is nowfifteen feet high, and the blueberrypatch has changed into a woodlandgarden.When I speak of "the garden" Iam primarily referring to the area inthe rear of the house. Although thelot is only fifty feet wide, it is onehundred sixty-five feet deep so thatthere is quite a bit of room back there,one hundred feet or more. This is furtherenlarged by a bank running acrossit, dividing it into two levels. WhenI joined the ARGS in 1958, this eastfacinggrassy slope became the site ofthe Rock Garden. It was spaded up,the turves turned over and buried anda montane situation simulated byspreading a heavy mulch of crumbled133