This Saturday is the Magnolia Green Garden tour and there may be as many as 100 people coming to our house. Bo suggested that "we" write a story about our garden to share with tour visitors. By "we," Bo means me, so while he's out watering the vegetables, let me tell you our garden story.
Begin with the giant Eucalyptus. This tree represents our early, aimless enthusiasm. Five years ago Bo and I bought our first home together, here in Magnolia. We were excited. We went to Swanson's. I bought a cute little exotic "Gum" tree, standing about three feet tall. Bo expressed concern - don't those get really large? His grandmother's place in California has a whole grove of Eucalyptus over 100 feet tall that permit nothing else in their presence. I was undeterred. The label said the tree was dwarf. Five years later, this gem is over thirty feet tall and growing. See for yourself. It's the only plant in our garden completely inhospitable to wildlife. I've never seen so much as a sparrow in it. But, hey, it looks good and reminds us of our early enthusiasm.
Next take in the general look of the front yard: native plants on the perimeters, raised vegetable beds where a lawn once laid, rain barrels catching the drops off the roof. This part of our garden is pretty in your face: practical, clear in its set of sustainability politics. This part of our yard feels like the botanical equivalent to "we're here, we're queer, get used to it." Instead of rainbow flags, we chose strawberries, blueberries and tomatoes. Technically they're all fruits, but you've got to make some subtle connections to figure it out.
For years Bo and I debated how to integrate the mishmash of tropical and native plants we'd added to the stodgy junipers, rhodies and camellias bearing witness to our home's 1950's past. When our beloved dog Kinsey died unexpectedly a year ago, we stopped debating. I needed a project to work through my grief, so I ripped out everything in our front yard that I didn't love. I just didn't have room for ambivalence. Goodbye 1950s plant heritage. It sounds violent because it was. I hacked at those shrubs and loosened the rootballs from their earthenly grasp. I dug out the sod, flipped it over and that became the soil where you now see tomatoes, corn, onions and strawberries. As a means of working through grief, I highly recommend ripping up your garden. It was also a great way to meet more of our great neighbors - who didn't hesitate to ask what I was doing . (I'll save the story of our recent weed-ordinance-violating lavendar plant that offended another neighbor for
another day).
Step into our home and continue out our backdoor onto the deck. From here you get a sense of why Bo and I fell in love with this house in the first place. See the expansive garden below. Feel the fresh air from the sea. Crane your neck a bit to the right and you'll see Mt. Rainier. The first time I ever stepped foot on this deck, I saw a lunar eclipse. We told the Realtor at that moment we were buyers. Some Realtors bake cookies, ours gave us the heavens. Whatever you do, don't turn left or you will see the enormous monster house going in a few doors down. McMansions: the scorge of Seattle. Even Magnolia is not safe from outsized ambitions that rob neighbors' gardens of light and air. For now, linger in a space that isn't in the shadows of some greedy builder - yet.
Travel down the stairs from the deck into the lawn that remains. We didn't rip them all out. Fortunately summer rains have spared us the difficult decision of a sustainable brown lawn v. a morally suspect green lawn. We weren't sure how we'd explain that to the garden tour organizers. They'd never believe that the slow steady drip of our rainbarrels could green a lawn.
Although not readily apparent to adults, our backyard is a place of many hiding spots. Our young nephews disappear at will during games of hide and seek and we find their "scavenger hunt" items long after they've forgotten them. If you come across an oversized plastic bug or undersized plastic dinosaur, let us know.
The large wooden object under the pine tree is our new compost bin. Bo constructed it from salvaged materials he found at ReStore, much like the salvaged wood we used for the front yard veggie beds, wood that Bo reminded me does not technically qualify as "bleachers" as I stated to the garden committee. But the tour programs have been printed, and people are expecting to see repurposed bleachers, so I ask you to use your imagination. The compost bin is a solid work of art with a shed roof in the same style as our 1950's home. the compost bin looks not unlike a chicken coop if you ask me. I'm not sure what that similarity says about our house.
One important note Bo and I would like to share regarding compost bins. You know how the city suggests homeowners put kitchen scraps in the secure plastic "food waste" bins rather than leave them in open compost piles? Turns out that's really good advice. We don't put our food scraps (not even carrot peelings) in our compost bin anymore. Nope. Seeing a rat in your grill after a dinner party is enough to make you rethink your composting strategy - even if the sighting is accompanied by the humor of your partners' unusually high pitched shriek. Lest you think little rodents are cute, keep in mind that they're big enough to trip the "motion detector" light on our deck. We're sitting in our living room some nights and suddenly the deck is illuminated. We know it's Mickey and Minnie back for a visit. We never had this problem when our dog was alive. Perhaps you can be wanton with food waste if you've got a big dog handy.
Walk down the gravel and stone path into the lower garden. I laid this path our first year here, to replace the mud path our dog Kinsey created from her playing. Our yard is a testament to the path of least resistance: paths where the dog wants them, plants that will grow easily in the spots they're planted, volunteer seedlings left to thrive where birds dropped them.
It's a garden of experimenting versus planning. A garden that grows out of glasses of wine after work, conversation with friends and family, and the simple desire for some quiet in a green place. You see traces of our experimentation in the two beds in our lower garden that grow salad and peas, and in the third bed's random assortment of perennials. The salad beds are too shady and far from a hose to grow much else. The perennial bed's full of castaways from other parts of the garden, not right enough for their original homes, but too dear to discard: an island of misfit toys that make sense when jumbled all together.
End your tour with a seat by our fire pit in one of the two Adirondack chairs. My mother bought us these on a visit from the east coast. These chairs are the ideal of our garden, a spot of respite surrounded by mature native plants, a place that no longer needs weeding. These chairs may be our idea of a garden, but they're not often occupied. We tend to be too busy with our work and social lives, or elsewhere in the garden to pull up a chair and take a load off. But I invite you to. Maybe Bo and I will get jealous seeing the pleasure you're taking in a moment of rest and will ourselves away from the weeding, and the working.
Or maybe not, these gardens take a fair amount of work and right at this moment Bo is pointing the hose at me and threatening to pull the trigger if I don't get off my butt and help him. So Enjoy! Thanks for lingering in our garden with us and thanks to Jennifer Carlson of Haven Illustrated for organizing the tour.
Our garden has many more stories to tell, which can be found on this blog under the category Urban Habitat: http://blog.seattlecitizen.org/categories/Urban%20Habitat.aspx 
