A Garden Is Worth a Few Backaches!

True garden-lover is willing to work for results, and even enjoys the labor en route to his or her horticultural success. It has always seemed to me that the people who have gardeners to care their beloved blooms and shrubs can’t possibly think as much of these plants as do folks like us who grub in the soil, prune, trim, weed, water and cajole. Even though we periodically flaunt calluses and blisters to prove our zeal! I may be wrong, and I hold no brief against those whose gardeners’ do magnificent and scientific jobs of flower-rearing, but I do think they miss a lot of fun!

Take our lilliputian, pocket-handkerchief garden, for instance. Had we been able to turn it over to a professional landscape architect and then to a corps of workers, we’d have had a lovely little garden spot in no time flat. But, like many other garden-lovers, we have a budget to pamper and the budget won’t stand for expenditures that aren’t in the necessity class. Besides, since we like to putter in our garden this inclination helped push the professional gardener out of this category.

Our garden is small. When we built our house we decided to have it small enough so we would be able to care for it although there was room in back for a garden twice the size we decided upon. Around this we built a patio wall for privacy. You need only look at the picture of the original barren spot to see how very discouraging it looked at first to two people who had only Sundays, holidays, and after-work hours in which to garden. Besides, our soil isn’t ‘soft and rich, and easy-to-work. It requires a great deal of babying, much additional fertilizer and shot-in-the-arm materials. All of these are expensive.

However, we are fortunate in having friends whose gardens are of longstanding and tolerate thinning, so the cost of getting our flowers and shrubs started was very little. We even have a good-friend-landscape-man who squinted thoughtfully, when we told him what we were going to plant in various spots, and “okayed” our selections. At first he thought that since one good friend was giving us a trio of lantana, we should space the three roots evenly. But when we told him we wanted them so we could enjoy their gorgeous blooms from our garden-room, he grinned and agreed that we were privileged to do as we felt. After all, a garden is for enjoyment and the more you can enjoy it – from the home as well as when in it – the better it does its job of beautifying, and boosting the spirit.

We, worked like slaves getting our garden started. But tired muscles and aching backs are nothing when you long for a garden. And you’ll have that garden come locusts, aphids, or name-your-own nuisances, even if you have to work by flood-light some evenings to finish an ambitious job you started in the late afternoon. And our flood-light did. heavy duty at first! All this was four years ago and now our wee garden is a joy to us, and although it is extremely simple, it is colorful. We even laid the brick for a little terrace, and despite our in experience, friends tell us we did a good job. We know that having this gives us a grand outdoor spot to sit and enjoy our floral results, even when the grass is wet. We eat many a meal here – even breakfast on holidays and Sundays – and the informal roofing that we built over half of it means part of the terrace is shaded for hot days, part is sunny for cool ones.

The poles which we used to support the overhead roofing of grasses would not fit with the bricks, or the bricks wouldn’t fit up to the poles, whichever way is the scientific way to phrase the information concerning the odd-shaped area around the base of each. So a friend gave us English ivy roots. We planted them at the base of the poles and now we wonder how we ever could have wanted such a plain, over-neat look as bricks coming to the poles and no greenery to soften the junction!

The same was true where the terrace reached almost to the house wall. Because of the platform at the entrance to the garden room, the brick wouldn’t have looked well continuing right to the house wall. This left a twelve-inch, irregular spaee between terrace and house – a space that bothered us terribly until we had a thought. Joint-plant in wall-pockets in the house had rooted and grown speedily, so we planted it at intervals in this sore-thumb area, watered it well . . . and in three months’ time the house and terrace were as beautifully “married” as one could wish. The joint-plant thrived and soon filled the space up to a plank we had installed for geraniums under the long garden-room window. Rarely doeS anyone enter our garden without exclaiming about the lush greenery in that spot which had been so barren before, so we feel we owe a special vote of thanks to our joint-plant (Zebrina pendula).

Our lawn was slow in coming, but we arose early and watered before business hours started, dashed into the garden in the late afternoon to repeat the process, pulled weeds until our fingers ached. Had we used a weed-exterminator we would have saved ninny a backache. We know that, now. But we actually had fun contesting to see who could get the largest basket of weeds in the shortest time! And, after all, any garden is worth a few backaches – at least that’s what we think as we leisurely enjoy our little homemade garden spot.

By L Bell

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