Each Little World

IVOM: Tea House display

After four months, our pond project is done. On Sunday, we hosted an Open Garden for friends to see the Zen face-lift we've given the pond. This is the arrangement we created for the Tea House. 

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. 

Entering the home stretch

Yesterday morning 5 cubic yards of quartzite chips were delivered from the quarry in Waterloo. Despite the presence of Mark's pickup truck, it took a bigger and stronger vehicle to carry this load. This is the final layer of the redesigned pond. I had to have Mark pull me up as the chips started to move all over as I attempted to stand up.  

The quartzite chips will cover up the dirt in the upper pool, the stream, waterfall and big pond. Those little wooden stakes all over the soil mark the depth of the gravel layer. Once this load has been spread around, we will get a second load. After that's in place, Mark can start using all the rocks he's set aside to redo the edges of the big pond (pictured below). 

Hot, tiring, slow work — even with help. But we're both brimming with excitement at this point. 

Pond-redesign update: The little gravel garden goes away

Garden projects like re-doing the pond are never quick or easy. They also create related projects that need doing at the same time. That's the case with this secondary project that we finished last week. This shows the area as it looked in the early years as you came around the house to the back garden. The old is deck on the left and the pond on the right. 

In 2008 we decided to turn this discreet area into a raked gravel garden to relate it to the one out front. Mark removed the grass, made a sinuous rock wall and put down weed barrier. 

It got topped off with fine gravel, raked and looked perfect. 

Thirteen years later, it is less than perfect with construction debris — limestone pieces and an old wood bench — taking up space. Both shrubs had seriously deteriorated from bad winters and bad bunnies. Mark and I decided that this raked gravel garden made no sense if we were turning the big pond into one as well. This smaller one would detract from the pond re-do, so it had to go. To revert this area back to a planting zone, meant that everything that had gone into its creation now had to come out.

First Mark removed the best gravel off the top and added it to the front gravel garden. The rest went into the pond (below) as filler. 

Then he pulled up all those pieces of weed barrier to reach the soil level.

But before we could add more dirt, we had to pull out the stone wall. 

Despite being smallish stones, they were heavy and not easy to just grab and pull out. I know since I helped on this part of the project. 

As stones were being pulled out on one side of this slope below the Tea House, they were being used to create a new wall on the other side. Previously logs delineated the path. 

First load of soil goes down just before the mostly dead shrubs were removed. The one on the left is a Burning Bush so I was fine with seeing it go.

Glad I left the flags in place as I never would have been able to figure out where my spring ephemerals were planted once the rock wall was gone. 

A second load of dirt and the area is ready for me to plant. The rock piles on the back right are for a different project. 

I used two bags of our chopped leaf much to keep the dirt from blowing away. 

I more or less have a planting plan; I just need to get up and out early enough to have energy to do the work. 

A new water feature

It always seems to me that gardeners in the UK have so many options for garden items, both practical and decorative. In the US, there are lots of things for the garden that are cute and colorful, but not many items that appeal to our taste. Here is the kind of water feature I keep seeing in British gardens, but no one is selling anything like it that I could find here.

It may not look like much at the moment, but we are both thrilled with our version of the above water feature. This is what's known as a "tank end" from the end of a tanker truck.

A friend of ours who is an artist blacksmith, suggested a tank end as an option for our water feature. He found us one and cleaned it up and did some repairs. We picked it up from him Sunday. It weighs 100 pounds so Mark did an elaborate setup to get it out of his truck. 

It's currently resting on a dolly in the driveway, but we've already decided where it should go in the garden. We have never made a joint garden decision so fast in our lives, which shows how excited we are to get it in place. 

It's 39" in diameter, so it will make a significant statement when it's flipped over and filled with water. It has a valve on the bottom with a plug so we can empty it easily if we need to clean it etc. More pictures once it's place.

The Ginkgo gives in

The big Ginkgo biloba finally acknowledged that it was cold enough and windy enough for it to bow to the weather and release its foliage. Love these pale yellow leaves against the silver blue spikes of Juniper 'Blue Star.'

The ground directly under the Ginkgo is thick with fallen leaves. Note the foliage of the Itoh Peony on the left. It is still almost perfect; the only Peony that never has fungal problems. 

The surface of the pond has so many leaves floating on it that you can't distinguish it as water. 

Garden reality

My garden was going to be one of the stops on the 2020 Garden Bloggers Fling in Madison until the pandemic put paid to such group events. Now I am glad it got postponed as it seems like it's been one problem after another in the garden.

First up was a leak in the stream between our pond and the header pool above it. Mark managed to find that leak and fix it. All was well until we realized there was yet another leak which still has not been identified. In the meantime, the pond is turned off so we can monitor the water level while Mark continues to investigate.

Mark promised me that he would give me ten years of his time to create a garden. He's devoted the better part of twenty years to it, but is more than ready to leave things up to me. I have never really managed the pond in all those years, so I just left the lilies that a critter upended out of their pots to float upside down on the pond. It does not seem to have stopped them from blooming. 

The garden is full of vignettes like this: plants in pots where you least expect them and where they don't add to the charm of the landscape. On the upside, all my loose pots are nicely caged to protect them from the bunnies. 

Finishing a project does not mean putting away the things you used — like buckets of rocks from the pond. There are no visitors coming to the garden, so who needs to clean up as they go? 

Our Japanese maple that we thought was killed in the polar vortex of 2018/19. It is coming back but looks pretty ridiculous at the moment. Still undecided if it should stay or go. 

The floral stalwarts of the garden did not make an appearance — or barely so — this year. Lilium landini is totally MIA while the Martagons got hit by the late frost and did not perform well at all. So there would have been no big floral display for the Bloggers if they had come. 

But the really big problems are the big items in the garden like our Arborvitae hedge that has been destroyed by the last few winters. The plants probably need a truck and a chain to put them out which can be done via our neighbor's driveway.  They will be replaced with a fence to obscure the sight of their vehicles. But Mark is much less interested in designing a fence than he once was, so we just walk by this mess and ignore it. 

In addition to this major problem in the front garden, it appears verticillium wilt has killed half of one of the trees that keeps my garden in the back from frying up in the late afternoon. None of this would feel so overwhelming if we were comfortable just called various folks to deal with these problems. But we are really limiting contact with anyone but a few close friends. 

So I am just trying to ignore all the problems and enjoying planting, cutting flowers for the house and even weeding which has been a breeze given our endless rain in June.

Home through the Hasselblad

Mark has spent his time during the past four months photographing with a variety of cameras: Digital, Pinhole and large format. Over the weekend, a friend loaned him a medium format Hasselblad camera. He used it to take these photos of our garden after spending time reading the manual, a big hardcover book! I love the mysterious, almost haunting quality of the images this film camera produced.

My English imitation

Euphorbia wulfenii is a mediterranean plant for Zone 7. No way it will grow in my Z. 4-5 garden. But I have been crazy for it since the first time I ever saw a picture of it in an English garden. 

It's only a couple of years after planting Euphorbia palustris at the edge of the upper pool that I realized how similar the effect is to that of E wulfenii.

An unexpected but very pleasant surprise.