The Annual Mother's Day Garden Tour Part II

This is the second installment of the gardens we toured over Mother's Day weekend.

I don't like to be critical of other people's private gardens especially when they've been gracious enough to open them up to the public for a good cause.  So I'll just say that the next house we stopped at just wasn't my style.  As a result, I didn't take a lot of pictures but here are a few that I did snap:

There was a very small pathway between the home on the tour and the home next door.  They had decorated both sides of the dividing fence with mosaic tile work which was the theme of this garden.  There was mosaic everywhere.

I found this collection of plates and mugs a bit messy but oddly charming.

The picture below was taken from the other neighbor's side of the fence.

Just down the street from this house was another garden that was very much my style.

You enter the back garden through this awesome looking gate.

The owners' bonsai collection is on display to immediately to the left of the entryway into the garden.  It set the stage for the rest of the garden which feature quite a bit of bonsai and the garden delivered on the promise of attention to detail as you would expect from bonsai enthusiasts.

The gardeners here included several globes and maps in their decor.

I thought this was a nice way to say "Please don't climb the steps".

Another bonsai display.

The outdoor kitchen.  These are pretty common in Northern California as we have a pretty long outdoor season.  It's not uncommon to smell the evidence of a barbecue from March through early November.

This garden also had a covered fire place and one of the cleanest pond/water features I've ever seen.

I admired the straight lines and rock work that made up a good part of this garden.  It doubles as a seating area allowed the gardeners to pack their yard with plenty of plants while maintaining a clean and orderly overall appearance.  

More to follow in the coming days.  Thanks for reading.

The Annual Mother's Day Garden Tour Part 1

I've been taking my wife and mother-in-law to a garden tour each Mother's Day weekend for the past seven years.  The tour raises funds for an elementary school in the neighborhood where these gardens are.  

It's a great tradition for us even though we all feel like it's become much more of a "backyard living" tour than actual garden tour.  There were seven stops total and I'll share pictures from most of those stops over the next few days.  

This first house was by far the most "garden like" house on the tour.  

There was no lawn in the front yard.  Only the flagstone patio with the fountain in the middle as pictured above and the flower beds shown in the first picture.

I love rain chains.  I've never been able to get one that worked very well for me but I love the look and the whole idea behind them.

I remember a whole thread of posts on Dave's Garden called "Show Us Your Compost Bins".  I think a lot of avid gardeners avoid composting because they have small spaces and they don't want it to look bad.  But this three-bin series fits right into the yard and doesn't look bad at all.  

The sound of running water is always welcome in the Sacramento heat.

These adirondack chairs were right next to the pond.

A single grape vine growing in this narrow side yard.

This jasmine-covered arbor smelled wonderful.  My wife, who sneezes every time she even happens to see a jasmine plant remarked out loud that she thought it might be worth all the sneezes to have this in our yard.

I'll leave you with a shot of their back porch.  The watering can was a staged item, I'm sure, but it was a nice touch.  

Stay tuned for more pictures in the coming days and happy Mother's Day to all the Mother's out there.

Piece By Piece

I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.  I don’t have any grand plans.  I don’t even have simple plans.  Every Saturday morning I trudge out to the shed, pull out the lawn mower and get started mowing.  It seems like it takes all day.  It really takes about 90 minutes.  But the chore of mowing the lawn is taking up too much of my mental time.  By the time I am finished I feel a little bit defeated and quite a bit overwhelmed.  I don’t know where to start.  What can I do to make this easier?  What can I do to transform this place into the Eden I found so easy to imagine when we first toured this house a few months ago? 

My new back yard is very nearly a green blank slate.

My wife has been encouraging me to hire someone to mow the lawn – at least for the summer so I can focus on the things I enjoy like planting trees, putting in pathways, and creating borders.  But I have resisted out of stubbornness.  I tell myself “I don’t want to pay someone to do what I can do for free.”  And yet I don’t think twice about paying to have someone change the oil in my car.  Surely, if I was going to have to surrender my man card for paying someone to mow my own lawn the Man card Defense Authority Department (McDAD) would have already taken it away for not changing my own oil filter, right? 

I have also resisted hiring someone to mow my lawn because part of me begrudgingly knows that this sort of angst is a necessary part of my assimilation with the new house.  This is part of the “just live with it for awhile” strategy that I know to be good advice.  It’s just that it has been harder and more discouraging than I imagined it would be.  I have missed the satisfaction that comes with creating a new bed.  I have missed the creative spark that flares up when you finally think of the perfect plant for the perfect spot.  I have missed that simple feeling of accomplishment when you stand back and realize that you have successfully addressed a problem.  But every week that I spend walking back and forth through the yard I sense that I am learning something valuable even if I can’t quite take that knowledge and transform it into a bigger picture.

This weekend I really started to sense a change though.  While I mowed the lawn, I noticed that one section of the yard was really dry in spite of being in deep shade and in spite of having given the impression of perpetual wetness earlier this spring.  I noticed that a different section of yard that was especially uneven and promised at least one gruesome ankle injury if the issue doesn’t get addressed. 

I started filling holes and discovered
many more in the process.

Though I was silently complaining to myself about the size of the lawn, the time I spent out there afforded me the luxury of day-dreaming about the summer ahead.  It occurred to me that this yard is big enough that I wouldn’t feel conflicted about filling up my daughter’s pool and just letting it sit there for a couple days.  The grass beneath it could die and it wouldn’t be a huge eyesore like it would have been in the smallness of our former yard.  As I struggled to maneuver the mower as close to the shed as I could, I had a quick vision of a small bed of flowers surrounding the shed with a trellis of sweet peas in the middle.

I think I'll remove the ornamental pear tree planted so closely to the shed and put in some kind of flower bed.

I could imagine a fall day, years from now, sitting around a stone fireplace with friends and kids while the dark came on us. I imagined friends sharing spiked hot chocolate or mulled wine while the autumn colors of trees I have yet to plant cast a quiet spell upon us.  

I found this picture on Houzz and I would love to mimic this some day.
(Traditional Patio by Portland Landscape Architect beautiful bones and purple stones)

Another view from a different angle.
(Traditional Patio by Portland Landscape Architect beautiful bones and purple stones)

I don’t know which of these things will come to pass.  Maybe I will have a different vision at some point that will inspire me to go in another direction.  But the encouraging thing is that I am starting to believe that I will, eventually, make this work.  This will become a place I can handle or at least a place that I will enjoy trying to handle. 

Living with it for a while is still going to take a while.  But piece by piece I am putting this puzzle together and it’s starting to feel okay that I’m doing it all without the picture on the box to guide me.