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the Chronicles:

Working with the Existing Features

The Migrant Rosebed

The Thickest Slab of Concrete in Cleveland

The Ill-Advised Arbor

Devastation and Ruin

Just a Little Fish Pool

Wynnie's Guided Tour:

The Pond

The Roses

Rose Bios

Sitting Around

Winter

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Chronicle 2: The Migrant Rosebed (the story of a fence)

It all started out innocently enough with nine English roses. This bed was dug on moving day in 1994, and planted a week or so later. Just a few weeks after that, the babies had all leafed out. When they bloomed for the first time, I started thinking about which roses to order next year. By the following season, there was no going back - I was hooked. Catalogs began to pour into the house at an alarming rate. The mailman hired a chiropractor.

Within a few years I had greatly expanded this original bed and created others to accommodate dozens of roses. By the early spring of 1997 I had dug the pond and had finally saved enough money to replace the odious chain link with a friendly little picket fence. I was eagerly expecting about a dozen more roses, for which I already had beds prepared, and was sure this was going to be the best season yet. I spent hours rearranging the new beds in my imagination, and visualizing how charming the roses would look draped over the new fence in June.

Then the neighbors dropped the bomb. They hated the picket fence. As a matter of fact, they hated the pond, they hated the garden, and most of all they particularly hated us. When I'd discussed with them my plan to replace the chain link fence with picket, they had readily agreed. But the reason they were so agreeable was that they'd understood "fence" to mean that they would no longer be able to see "the mess that I'd made of the back yard".

We were horrified. We knew we didn't have much in common with these people, but we'd always had a cordial relationship with them. We had no idea that they had been growing angrier and angrier for the last three years. In their eyes, my garden, which is admittedly as different as it can be from their own tidy lot with its meticulously edged chemically-dependent lawn, was a disgrace and an eyesore.

Apparently they had been suspicious of my intentions from the moment the first blade of grass was sacrificed to make room for a bed of roses. By the time I began digging the pond, the list of atrocities committed on this small plot of land had grown to mythic proportions, and they made it quite clear that a picket fence - the final straw - was too great an offense to be tolerated. When they began to threaten us with legal action unless we allowed them to tear down the picket and replace it with a six-foot high solid board fence, we realized the relationship had become too strained to try and salvage. Although we certainly hadn't broken any laws by making a garden instead of a lawn, we finally agreed.

As they began to tear down the charming fence I'd spent several years wishing and saving for, I hid in the house and tried to visualize the new space. There are enormous oak trees in all the other neighbors' yards, so all the light we get comes from the east where the wall was going! I was sure it would block all but about three hours a day of sunlight, and that I'd never see another rose or water lily blossom. There were more roses on the way, and I had nowhere to put them all.

After I stopped crying I dug up all my beloved herbs and moved most of the English roses into the old herb bed. I couldn't bring myself to touch Winchester Cathedral, who was just too enormous and thorny and well established (and full of buds) to try and move. I replaced all the rest with ivy, ferns and hydrangeas, bought a copy of Ken Druse's "The Natural Shade Garden", and prepared to enjoy Winchester Cathedral's last hurrah.

Or so I thought. In short, I miscalculated. Although I have lost the pleasure of watching the lovely early-morning rays dancing on the water, there's only a quarter of the pond in which waterlilies will no longer bloom. The hydrangeas and ferns fried, Winchester Cathedral enjoyed his usual four flushes, and after 10am or so every day, the ivy sulked in the sun. The proportions are all wrong - the roses are too tall for the herb bed, and Fair Bianca never bloomed again once she was moved in among the oak tree roots, but Heritage, and the Pilgrim seem to enjoy the challenge and have done better than ever before.

So in the spring of 1998, I moved the hydrangeas and ferns, and replaced them with peonies, a "Blue Bird" hibiscus, a dwarf clethra, and of course, more roses. I've since added oriental lilies and underplanted most everything with catmint, lady's mantle and 'Johnson's Blue' cranesbill. It's becoming apparent that I will soon have to tear it all out again to build raised beds, due to the neighbors' proclivity for pouring undiluted weedkiller along their side of the fence several times a year. (If you have a better idea, please let me know!)

But for the most part, both sides of the fence are now much happier, and I feel freer to experiment, knowing that I'm no longer offending anybody else's sensibilities. Best of all, the garden has become a private, secluded haven in the middle of the city. The wall supports many birdhouses which are adopted by countless bird families each season. I've attached a trellis to every fence post, and great foaming mounds of sweet autumn clematis lend life and fragrance to the great wall.

Chronicle 3: a slab of concrete...