Geoffrey wrote: ↑Tue May 12, 2020 1:02 am
this message was written with the intention of satisfying your curiosity, curt. should you wish to reciprocate by giving an insight into
your world that would surely make interesting reading. a lot of people are reticent to share personal details or pictures of themselves, and that is ok, it doesn't matter. vive la difference!
Geoffrey, the wording of your invitation amused me, as I never considered that insights into my world contain aspects that would surely make interesting reading. However, your words were sincere, and so I will try.
After culling through my interests, one that may not be totally boring is gardening/landscaping. No matter how small your plot is, it offers the opportunity to experience first-hand the futility of man permanently dominating a piece of this Earth. Back when I was engaged, Joann had just passed her realtor's exam. (Selling real estate was a job that was particularly unsuitable for her, but she did not know that yet.) At that time my job was somewhat new as well, so this was not a good time for us to be thinking about buying a home. Nevertheless, in an attempt to bolster her confidence, I agreed to look at listings with her, but included some demands that I felt could not be met; the most outrageous of these was that the home we bought had to have a stream flowing through the yard. The next thing I knew we were applying for a mortgage loan (at 17% no less) to buy a stone farm house with--a steam flowing through the yard.
Until that time my experience with gardening was limited to growing tomatoes a couple of summers on my apartment terrace (with terrible results I might add). Now I was in charge of 1.47 acres with a small pond, elegant willow trees, and of course, the stream. We moved into the home in October, and within the first two weeks were awakened in the middle of the night by a very loud crash. That crash wound up being the sound that a giant (20 foot circumference) weeping willow tree makes when it gets tired of life and just falls over. This was my first clue that taming nature might be more involved than I thought.
But we persevered, Joann just adores flower beds, and so over the years we transformed huge swaths of easily-mowable lawn into garden beds that needed constant weeding. And not to be outdone, I dug up some more lawn and established vegetable garden beds, the exact number of square feet required to provide us and probably three additional families with all the vegetables needed each summer. It was around that time--maybe five or six years after we moved in--that we discovered something that farmers and growers learned a long time ago: the delphiniums and cabbages do not care if their beds are weeded by you personally, or by someone you pay to do so. We were fortunate to then be in a position to pay for some help, so that freed up some of our time. Joann spent her extra hours wisely by getting back into reading; I spent my extra hours devising plans to convert many dollars and much effort into a landscape.
I became a voracious reader of books and magazines on gardening and landscaping and eventually learned a lot about plants, shrubs, and trees--which ones do well where we live, what soil they need, light requirements, etc. It is about at this point that I considered myself as being sort of a professional in that I no longer needed others' advice (except of course Joann always has the final say). Gardening, like most endeavors, involves successes and defeats, but often you need to wait years to find out the final score. A success is planting something that, ten years later is thriving and, most importantly, looks totally natural and in place.
There exists a sad, but inevitable aspect to gardening and landscaping: the ground wants to be what it wants to be, and so do the stream and pond, and they will ultimately prevail, because they have more time than we do. This is all a part of the scientific laws that say that, in the absence of opposing forces, the natural scheme is to move from order to disorder. Our stream, which can run fast in wet periods, does not really want to do that. It wants to be a shallow, meandering flow, so it tries to widen its banks. The stones that line parts of the stream do not want to sit on each other in a wall, they would rather fall down and become more random. Our pond abhors being a pond, so it channels water flowing through it to the center which encourages silt to accumulate at the sides, the game plan being to turn into first, a swamp, and then, a meadow. And all that we have planted is just transitory, in the long run species that are "native" in our area may be overtake by others (we now have a weed called Japanese stilt grass which is all over the place; a dozen years ago it was unknown here). And yet, we still toil on. Just today I marveled at how well a mock orange shrub was doing since it was rescued from a too-shady location last fall!
Postcript: If one is interested in landscaping, especially as it was implemented on some of the noteworthy English estates, there are a couple of good books about Lancelot "Capability" Brown (1716-1783) that I enjoyed. Capability Brown is sometimes referred to as "England's Greatest Gardner." His landscape designs had no limitations, and sometimes went as far as creating lakes and moving rivers!
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