Each Little World

We agree.

I have been lost in the pages of "English Gardens from the Archives of Country Life" by Kathryn Bradley-Hole. It's a big, heavy, expensive and absolutely gorgeous book I ordered from the public library. It's an in-depth look at England's national love affair with gardens, divided into themes like topiary, cottage, rose, and modern gardens to name a few. I've filled the pages with strips of paper marking ideas and inspiration.

The text that really jumped out at me was by Sir Roy Strong talking about making changes in one's garden. Strong's "A Small Garden Designer's Handbook,' was my bible (above) when Mark and I created our first garden in 1990. I own "The Laskett," the book Strong and his late wife, Dr. Julia Trevelyan Oman, did about the garden they made together. And the follow-up book Strong wrote (below) about the changes he made to their garden after her death. 

In this big Country Life volume, Strong was talking about "the literal 'bringing in' of new light, air, and energy" to the garden. He said:

 

"Never cease to be brave, I say, even if you are about to enter your seventieth year. I'm tired of emails from elderly friends always downsizing and disappearing into retirement homes or sheltered housing. My instincts are to do exactly the opposite and go out in a blaze of madness . . . It's exciting that, thirty years on, innovation is still possible. The worst thing that could happen to The Laskett garden is for it to atrophy."

 

It was an unexpected pleasure to discover we are not alone in radically changing our garden after almost 30 years and well into our 70s! It's a message that seems the perfect way to begin the new year. 

Pond re-design: The final frontier

Before adding the next layer of fill to the pond, Mark put down permeable weed barrier.

The weed barrier is intended to keep the layer of screened top soil from filtering below. 

We took advantage of a big hole partly full of dirt to replicate our portrait taken on the day we started to build the pond in 1997.

Once the soil brought the pond level up high, Mark attacked the stream bed and waterfalls. He took out all the rocks from that area, piling them temporarily on the soil in the big pond. Then he removed as much rubber liner and carpet from the stream as possible. A number of the rocks in this area were set with a bobcat and two people. 

We were lucky to be able to borrow a couple of contractor's wheelbarrows. These are built to carry loads of concrete. Even empty, I could barely lift and move them. 

Mark's assistant, Angelo, had no trouble moving them full of dirt or gravel. Everything had to go from the driveway up an incline into the back. Angelo was amazing in how quickly he could move those barrows. 

The soil layer also got rained on which helped to settle it and let Mark determine if his calculations were correct. 

At this point, Mark began preparing for the final layer: Quartzite chips. He put wooden stakes in the ground, linked with string, to indicate the depth the chips needed to be, tiny surveyor's stakes. 

The quartzite chips needed to be put down without mixing any dirt up into this final layer. We were following the system that Olbrich Botanical Gardens uses in their sustainable gravel gardens. 

Once all the quartzite chips were settled on top of the soil. Mark began to level the pond surface. (It may not hold water but Mark and I still call it the big pond, stream and upper pool.) This was amazing to me to watch as he went the length of the pond on his hands and knees with a long, even board, a level and smaller pieces of wood to smooth the surface. 

He took design breaks to work on placement of the stones around the pond edges. The round stone was moved a number of times, getting it just the right distance from the pebble beach. 

You can see he changed his mind on how this area should be edged compared to the big stone blocks he experimented with above.

This view from the Upper Pool shows the stepping stones that cross it and the top of the stream on the other side of them. 

Even the stream bed has raked patterns. 

The sharply curving rock in the bottom pool of the stream symbolizes a jumping fish. 

Once Mark removed that wide swath of Carexes to make his working "bridge," we decided not to replace any of them. Instead he created a beautiful little path down to the east end of the big pond.

He set a grindstone into the quartzite chips so you could step out into the pond for a different experience than just viewing from a distance. 

Mark's first raking design was a very traditional linear pattern, the length of the pond. 

The big stones in the pond and the curving edges mean there will always be curvilinear patterns. 

This is where the stream meets the pond. 

I love this view from the path between the two hills in the garden. It is a view I rarely noticed when the pond had water. 

This was his first raindrop pattern, which was quickly followed by more elaborate version. 

This was his most recent pattern: diagonal lines across the width of the pond. Though it is a very simple design, it has proven one of the most effective because we can "read" it from inside the house. It also gets lit by east and west raking sun which makes the pattern pop.

Mark began this project on April 4th and finished on Aug. 17 — four and a half months later. It was an almost daily effort; whether with a wheelbarrow or a pen and paper. We couldn't be happier with the result. We celebrated the "unveiling" with an open garden event in early September. It was also Mark's 75th birthday. 

Pond re-design: The Upper Pool

The first step that Mark undertook in his big pond re-design project was the Upper Pool. This is where the recirculated water whooshed out between the rocks, overflowing between the stepping stones to travel down the stream into the big pond. (Double click the pictures to see the images larger).

. . .

2010: I was not allowed to plant in this area until Mark built the Tea House which is adjacent to it; a 10-year project in itself. Clearly this photo is from the earliest planting scheme which involved a lovely Amelanchier tree that died. 

2015: Five years later and things are coming along. The weeping Serbian spruce tree blocks your view down the stream into the big pond. 

2018: By this time the Upper Pool is almost completely hidden by the native water plant, Sagitaria latifolia. This view clearly shows the stepping stone path between the Upper Pool on the right and the stream on the left. 

APRIL 2021: Mark began actual work on the Upper Pool as soon as it was possible in the spring. He thought of the Upper Pool as his test project to see how this whole concept of a dry gravel garden would work. It meant taking the pond plumbing apart up here and pulling out the rubber liner. Doing that, however, also meant that we had made the pond system inoperable. There was no going back from this step.

Mark's using a sump pump and a commercial strainer to get all the  water out of the pool and the wet organic debris that was at its bottom. He piled the debris in the strainer to let as much water drain off as possible. 

I then emptied them into a wheelbarrow and he dumped the goop in any available bare spot in the garden to dry it out more. Eventually we took it to the Badger Road drop-off for garden waste. 

Once the pool was empty and dry, he pulled out any rocks he wanted to rearrange.

Next the hole was filled with soil. Notice how he was moving a wheelbarrow across piece of plywood on top of the steeping stones in order to dump the dirt where he wanted it. A more treacherous system than I was comfortable with, but he didn't have any accidents. 

We had initially thought we could hire a landscape firm to do this project, but the ones we called weren't interested. It didn't take Mark long to realize he was constantly making decisions that only he could make. It was not easy, but it made sense to do everything by himself that he was able to do. Here he's reshaping the edge and rearranging the rock placements. 

MAY: Mark drove up to Michel's Waterloo Quarry and brought back a pickup truck load of quartzite chips for the top layer of the Upper Pool. 

JUNE: We continued to play around with rock placement up here as work on the big pond began. You can see that the gravel does not go beyond the edge of the pool at this point in the process. 

August: As work on the big pond drew to its conclusion, Mark topped up the Upper Pool with more quartzite chips. Here you can also see that the gravel is now in the stream bed on the other side of the stepping stones as well. 

SEPTEMBER: The view in the other direction, standing on the stepping stones. 

I know a lot of gardening friends were shocked when we told them what we were planning to do. We were both thrilled with the result of this first big step. The garden feels new and different, which is not easy to accomplish when you have been in the same place for almost 30 years.

The gravel lightens the look and physically opens this area compared to when it was full of water plants. It is the perfect contrast to the highly planted area that surrounds it. 

Pond re-design update: Our new water feature

When you embark on a major garden re-design, you suddenly discover all sorts of areas that need smaller changes to accommodate the big garden changes. For many years, this area on the east side of our property was a moss garden. It was created when we put the pond in in 1997/98 and I wasn't allowed to plant anywhere else in the garden as it was almost entirely a construction site. So here I sat, pulling out grass to reveal the moss hidden underneath it. Fast forward 20 years to the realization that this was a labor intensive little spot, given our whole property was now under cultivation. 

When we had the boulder wall, stone steps and paver driveway done in 2015, I needed to quickly find a big holding area for all the plants that lined the driveway. If I wanted to keep them, everything for two feet deep along the drive had to be dug up and put in temporary homes. Using the moss garden to solve this problem made it easier to say goodbye to that early garden. 

Once all those plants had been put back along our redesigned front drive, we decided to take advantage of this now empty spot. We moved the bench that had been on our deck out under the old apple tree and created a path that directed you to it off the main gravel path.  

For the first time, we had a spot to sit and view the garden down the length of the pond to the Tea House. Until this moment, we'd always sat on the bench on the deck and looked across the width of the pond to the hills behind it. 

Once we decided to leave this new seating area, I began to plant Yew (Taxus) shrubs that I planned to eventually prune into globes. 

I planted Maidenhair ferns and Hakonechloa macra grass, intending to fill the space between the shrubs with those two plants. 

Eventually I gave up on the Japanese forest grass as the rabbits would not leave it alone. I concentrated on the ferns and added two tiny Acer pseudosieboldianum (Korean maple) trees. I didn't get very far with this replanting plan last summer, when all the debris we discovered buried under our old deck was shifted over here.  

All of that broken concrete was put in the bottom of the empty pond this summer as Mark progressed on his big project. This unplanted area turned out to be the perfect location for our new water feature: The metal endcap of a tanker truck that is 39" in diameter. It has a valve on the bottom to release water when we want to clean it out. 

I've planted Carexes, Hellebores and Geranium phaeums around it. After I did that, I discovered why bird baths are raised off the ground: Birds kept trying to land on the ferns and all the plants. I'm waiting to see if the plants can solidly fill in to a degree that will keep the critters off of them. 

We are both thrilled with this new water feature that was found for us by a friend who is a retired metalworker. 

On a recent visit to Olbrich Botanic Gardens, we discovered they are trying to keep all their garden debris on site. They are finding all kinds of visible, often decorative, uses for logs and tree branches. We decided we would do the same with one of the logs we had from last year's tree removals. 

While the birds initially drank from the tank edges, the addition of tree branches extending into the water resulted in an explosion of avian visitors. Sometimes it looked like they were lined up on a runway waiting their turn to taxi down to the water.

We needn't have worried that removing our 7,000-gallon pond would result in a loss of birds and wildlife in the garden. 

Rake No. 2

When I posted about Mark's new rake to make patterns in the gravel garden last week, Loree Bohl of Danger Garden commented: "I saw Mark's rake and thought 'how ingenious!' followed by 'but I bet he's working to design something more artistic...'." She was right.

I had barely posted the images of what he was up to, when he showed me his new rake (on the right). This one makes deeper marks which are more visible at the new, larger scale needed in this bigger gravel garden. 

Having made a new rake, he completely re-worked the gravel garden in a new pattern. It looked absolutely stunning. Sunday he created yet another entirely new motif of interlocking circles like raindrops.

There's only one problem with him playing in the gravel. I am not allowed to walk on it which means I can't work around the edges, planting where he's left room for shrubs and perennials. Neither one of us wants to reveal the finished symbolic pond until it is complete. So you will have to wait a little longer to see it in its full beauty. 

Practice makes perfect

Last Friday, Mark went to the quarry in Waterloo to get a pickup-load of quartzite chips to finish the pond project. Though we'd had 14 cu. yards of the chips delivered, he wanted a tad more to get it all even and to the height he wanted.

He spent Saturday unloading them and getting the surface completely even. On Sunday he got out all the big garden forks and rakes and tried them out to see what kind of patterns he could make in this gravel. 

None of them were quite the right size to make marks of a scale that works with an area this large.

So he went to the hardware store yesterday and came back and made his own temporary wooden "rake." We both agreed that he's moving in the right direction. 

Here's his temporary rake: The handle and screw plate from a sponge-style floor mop fitted with a board into which he inserted dowels. Once he decides exactly the size and spacing of the dowel markers, he plans to make a more artistic version in keeping with the artfulness of the garden as a whole. 

Mark dug out a huge swath of Carex siderosticha variegata to make a working route from our gravel garden path down to the pond. Along the way he decided to leave the path as a way to get closer to the gravel garden. You now walk down a gray gravel path with these limestone bars (filled with Mexican river rocks) across it. You can then step out onto the grindstone and flat rock in the third photo above.  

This whole project is coming together nicely. He now needs to work on the rock placement around the edges of the "pond;" then I follow with the plants. 

Holidaying in the garden

We hosted our group that meets every Saturday morning at a local coffeeshop for a casual breakfast at our house on Saturday. It was the first time the whole group of us had been together since they were all here on New Year's morning 2020 for our 10th annual brunch. The weather was lovely and it was wonderful to all be together again.

On the 4th, the two of us gardened despite the temperature hitting 90°F., as rain is forecast for much of this coming week. By the late afternoon, we were both ready to call it quits and retire to the Tea House 

We had our sake bottles, with cups as caps on display, but actually had very American cocktails and hors d'oeuvres.

Mark was calculating the amount of dirt he still needs to finish this part of his pond project.

The view out the door by where I was sitting.

Mark raked a pattern into the new gravel garden for our gathering Saturday.

Our heron may have found a permanent home at last.

The view out the window that wraps to the left right around the corner. 

It's back to work in the garden again today for the two of us. Hope you had a pleasant weekend and enjoy the continuing holiday today. 

Wordless Wednesday

Lichen love

The natural garden

Nature just does what it wants, when it wants, where it wants. There's nothing to do but enjoy it.