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Chronicle 1: Working with the Existing Features
Do you read as many gardening magazines as I do? I have volumes and volumes of Garden Design and Fine Gardening magazines, hundreds of gardening books and more web sites bookmarked than I can keep track of.
Have you noticed how each and every book or article on starting a garden from scratch begins with the helpful advice to "work with the existing features?"
You know...the mellow stone walls of the numerous crumbling outbuildings built by the master stonemasons indentured to your ancestors? That charmingly dilapidated old dovecote tucked away in the corner of the orchard? That sort of thing? The ruins of that 150-year-old glasshouse could be just the focal point your garden lacks, if only you had the imagination to see its potential. You poor pathetic fool.
And if all else fails, they invariably advise us to "Borrow your neighbor's view!"
the existing features
Well, listen up, editors of Country Life: This was the bucolic view from here:
Behind this 40-year-old aluminum bungalow were 26 snowdrops, one overgrown lilac, a concrete patio, some rocks and lots and lots of chain link. Oh, and the wild onions. Yes, I know all about the rusty bedsprings they had to haul away at Sissinghurst. Vita and Harold had a bit more to work with than this civil servant's paycheck, didn't they?
Yep, this here is the inspiring view from our sunroom, circa 1993. Where was the National Trust? Where was Penelope Hobhouse? Where was the wise old neighbor with perennials that needed dividing? (And where, oh where was my inheritance?)
