Day two of clearing - a perfect day to burn and enjoy a picnic lunch.
This time last year, deep into writing the last chapter of Canterbury and Other Tales, I hardly noticed what was going on in my garden. It was chilly last January, bulbs were tucked, sleeping below the earth, under snow. My pond was frozen, branches lay broken and flattened from the storms of December. My garden lay ignored. Neglected.
“I’ll deal with you in the spring,” I’d promised.
I broke that promise. Sure, I did the usual spring tidy up and planting, but I didn’t get to the main event which was to reclaim what had once been a beautiful rose garden. Fir trees – on an adjacent property – have grown and for the last six years have cast too much shade for sun-loving roses to thrive. They became lanky and didn’t bloom well. Disenchanted, I avoided that area of my garden – there are plenty of other spaces to enjoy and there was no longer anything pleasant about that thorn-ridden place.
The forest came back as only a west coast forest can do. Some of the roses died, others continued to struggle, spreading themselves up and over and through the jungle of salmon berry, holly, Oregon grape, bracken, and bamboo. Oh my, the bamboo.
“This is clumping bamboo,” the woman at the bamboo nursery had said.
She did not tell the truth. There is nothing clumping about this variety of bamboo. Without supervision, it rampaged far and wide.
The whole mess was overwhelming. What to do? For four summers in a row, I armed myself with shears, walked to the edge of a towering wall of vegetation, stared, and retreated. Another day, another year. The jungle, of course, kept growing. Densifying.
This year I’m deep into research for my next book – it will be a fiction this time, but the warmer weather has pulled me outdoors and I’m on a mission to establish a better balance between writing and gardening – two time-consuming passions. I’m also sorting details of an upcoming book tour to the UK and preparing a presentation for Elder College, but the rose garden, come jungle, is no more.
With help – it has been decimated. Chopped down – chain saw required. Dug up – excavator required. Re-envisioned – determination, imagination, rake, shovel, hoe, many wheelbarrow loads of roots and branches carted away and more wheelbarrows of bark mulch, fresh soil and gravel carted in required. A colossal undertaking.
Soon a blank canvass will be ready for a new planting. Shade loving shrubs this time, I think. A shrubbery instead of a rose garden.
Remember that Monty Python movie where King Arthur and his buddies meet a knight in an enchanted woodland? The knight demands, “Bring me a shrubbery. One that looks nice. And not too expensive.”
Just the thing for a shady place in my enchanted forest garden, minus the knight.
Highlights of the reclamation project to date.
Moving a fig tree from a container by the house into a new space in the shrubbery.
And this is how to dig up bamboo. That was one scary plant. Good bye bamboo.
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