Garden with a mind of its own
Because of our recent cold days, I’ve had to wear gloves when I go to the garden which makes it harder to operate my binoculars. Nevertheless, gloves are handy because it is easier to pull out what’s left of the rudbeckias. Some of the dried flowers’ stalks were taller than me, and they return every year. They were on this hillside before the garden.
Rudbeckias seem to like the two hügelkultur beds still in development. Those beds were dug out at least one foot deep in the spring and filled with organic matter off all kinds including a couple short rotten logs. Piles of leaves, sticks, grass clippings have been added since, and today among the leaves in one spot was dark friable soil – a happy omen. Still time to pile on more before spring.
At the lower end of the garden is another hügelkultur just begun except this one will not be dug. Heaped on top of the marked off spot are all manner of leftover plant parts, often stalks and all. In the mix are seed heads which might sprout, but the mound has just begun with more piling yet to come. I’m a scientist and this is an experiment. It might work.
A garden is a living thing, and the living thing is a living thing. It morphs and maneuvers year-to-year. The hügelkultur beds are examples of the living thing morphing, and the gardener was only the work, not the source of the morph. I did what seemed like a good idea.
Near the new hügelkultur bed is a bed originally intended for vegetables. It is underneath an oak and is an outlier bed, so it might not have gotten the attention of beds uphill, but yarrow and columbines have made a home there. Golden Alexanders live in the front corner every spring beside a small native shrubby plant with tiny flowers that came of its own accord – not what the gardener planned, so the bed has made itself, so to speak.
While I was standing beside this bed, a pileated woodpecker flew into view squawking and being important. It landed high in a small oak but quickly hopped down onto a sumac bush and hung upside down by one leg while eating sumac berries. I had to put my gloves aside for a moment to get a good look.
Speaking of berries, at least three kinds are native to this hillside, and I kept a cluster of blackberries in their own bed in the middle of the garden. They send out runners, so now canes have sprouted in new places. Over by the fence a new patch of them are claiming turf and needing pruning. More berries is a good thing, and I intend to give more space to blueberries, raspberries and whatever obscure fruit the seed catalogs make me buy. How about Cornelian cherries?
One skinny, curvy bed in the northeast corner is becoming entirely a perennial bed because apparently that was the plan all along, but I did not know it yet. I look forward to the day I spend 45 minutes picking berries.
I wonder if spearmint running rampant and spreading itself all over was part of the plan. I put some in a bed just for temporary 10 years ago, and now I know better. Spearmint does not do temporary. It can be herbally cute dangling over rocks, it has a pleasing scent, and it is excellent in tea, but it’s plan is to send underground runners far and wide regardless of the gardener’s intentions. As a youth I also had my own out-of-control spearmint moments, but I’ve learned there are places I don’t belong whereas spearmint, like comfrey, must spread.
The garden abides ambitious spearmint, so I should as well. The garden patiently evolves, and I should also.