Cold Climate Gardening

Perhaps it is a bit extreme to say “Paths make the garden,” but ever since I was a child paths have been an emotionally significant element to my enjoyment of a garden. I didn’t realize this until we moved to the rural 15 acres where we now live, when I struggled with how to turn acreage into a garden.

That a path exists gives a sense of safety. You know you won’t get lost or swallowed up as long as you can see the path. The fact that you can’t see where a path leads is what lends it the air of mystery, what gives you a little tingle of excitement.

Once I realized that paths were called for, the problem became one of creating and maintaining them. (I still feel abysmally ignorant about this subject, so if anyone knows of a book on trail maintenance, please let me know.)

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Sunday, October 8th, was a gorgeous autumn day, sunny and warm. I decided to go up the hill for a walk in the woods, camera in hand, and you get to share the results. (Be forewarned: this is an even longer than usual post.) But first, a little bit about where we’re going. Our family lives on 14 acres. It is a narrow slice of hillside, with our house near the road at the bottom of the hill and our land going uphill for about half a mile. Once upon a time, it was all forest. We figure our house was built sometime in the 1880s, so that’s probably about the time the trees were cleared for pasture, though it’s always been marginal land for grazing: not especially fertile acid clay, with a high water table that leaves many areas soggy during years of average rainfall. The forest has been growing back as the occupant before us (and maybe the one before him) gradually stopped mowing the areas furthest away from the house, though we still have a field of about 4 to 5 acres.

The field gets mowed yearly with a brush mower, which is also used to keep paths through the woods cleared enough so a suburban girl like me can pick her way without carrying a machete or getting lost. The path starts out in what I call the Secret Garden, which is an area closer to the house that reverted to trees early because it’s clearly too wet to mow. I have dreams of turning it into a native plant garden, but for now, that’s mostly all it is, an idea that, maybe someday . . . After meandering through the Secret Garden, the path starts going up, and threads through the hedgerow alongside the field before joining the woods proper.

Don’t these berries look ornamental? And the birds love them. Such is the recipe for disaster, for these are rose hips of the invasive Rosa multiflora. This shrub is growing on the bank of the seasonal brook that borders the northern side of our property, right before it narrows and becomes easy to cross at the top of a hill. As you cross the brook at this point, you can look back down the slope and watch the water spill over the rocks. I used to dream of sitting on a bridge and enjoying the view, which I would enhance with ferns and native flowers planted into the steep bank. But it took a mere decade for this little glen to fill up with the thorn-infested brambles, which I’ll have to remove before I can ever realize my dream, and I’ll have to be eternally vigilant ever after. Don of An Iowa Garden has been working on eradicating this shrub, and it sounds exhausting.

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Today is my grandma’s 98th birthday. I originally wrote this essay for a Fine Gardening contest (which I didn’t win), and decided to revise it and share it with you in honor of her special day.

It’s funny how gardens are such emotional things. You enter some gardens and feel as though you are in someone’s living room, the kind of living room where they keep the plastic on the lampshades to keep them from getting dirty, and you are afraid to move for fear of breaking a knick-knack. Then there are the gardens that speak to something deep within yourself, that open up the hidden places inside you that bear witness: Yes, this is truly a garden. And it’s a place that draws you to itself; you want to go back again and again. But understanding what it is about a garden that creates that sense of recognition, of kinship, almost, is another thing altogether.

It wasn’t until I was an adult, attempting to create my own garden, that I realized how deeply my experience of my grandmother’s garden influenced my idea of what a garden should be. But of course, no one called it a garden, even though there were ornamental plants in it. We always called it the yard. The house itself was built close to the street; the yard was primarily to the right and the rear of the house. The entire property was enclosed by a hedge probably three to four feet high. There was a gate in the rightmost side of the hedge, allowing easy access to the neighbors. The main lawn, bordered on the left by the driveway and the right by this hedge, was the location of many family reunions and happy memories. My grandfather had built a brick patio and barbecue grill, and various male members of the extended family took their turns cooking everything from hamburgers to London broil. Meanwhile, the women were in the kitchen, frying peppers and onions and preparing other dishes. We children wove in and out of them, taking in the gossip and talk of politics, until the food was ready to eat. Eventually, the grownups settled into lawn chairs in the dappled shade. The great-uncles slipped us sips of their drinks.

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I’m so psyched! Rundy finally started mowing a trail through the secret garden with the DR Brush Mower. It has been my dream for years to have walking trails through our acreage and it’s finally coming true. Ever since I walked the paths in my Grandma LaFemina’s Long Island yard, and followed my Uncle Jimmy along a path through the woods near his house, I have been drawn to paths or trails leading off into the quasi-unknown. When we first moved here, I struggled to understand what I wanted my garden to be–what garden meant to me, psychologically. It wasn’t until I read “North by North Hill” by Wayne Winterrowd in an issue of Horticulture that …

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