Find out where a person was living at age 4, landscape designers say, to find out what sort of landscape is embedded in the person's psyche and represents the ideal garden to them. It's one of many ways to come up with a landscape that feels like home, but it can be a powerful tool.
When I was 4, one of my favorite places to go was my Aunt Betty's garden. She and Uncle Fred owned a few acres in Plainfield, New Jersey. Living almost 20 miles away, we visited almost weekly throughout my childhood. The stone house was fun because it had archways and all the rooms were connected, arranged around the central staircases. But even better was the garden.
Aunt Betty was an organic gardener and did many things in her garden that are now being touted as “sustainable.” Her soil was so soft and rich that she could plunge her arm into the soil up to the elbow. She'd often collect “slips” when she visited other gardens, then easily root these cuttings in her soil. Instead of using a compost bin, she dug compostables into the soil. But the secret of her soft soil was leaf mold.
Most of the property was shaded by well-spaced beech trees, with at least one immense tulip tree in the center. Each fall, they dropped prodigious quantities of leaves, which my aunt and uncle raked to the edge of the lawn where the land sloped steeply down to the Green Brook. After about 3-4 years, the leaves had turned into a rich, dark soil amendment that Aunt Betty used liberally in her garden beds. By the time I was 4, the gardens had benefited from at least a decade's yearly additions of leaf mold.
Furthermore, the garden was watered with rainwater, not only directly from the sky, but also collected from roof runoff in two oak barrels. Whenever we walked in the garden, Aunt Betty would dip a container into the rain barrel to water some plants, or scoop out the mosquito larvae for her goldfish pond.
When I visited with my cousins, one of our favorite places was the sunken garden. Under the trees, within view of the kitchen window, Aunt Betty dug a terrace nearly 2 feet deep, added flagstone for the floor and 3 shallow steps, shored up the sides with flagstone and fieldstone, and furnished it with white wrought iron furniture.To small children, it felt like a secret garden even though it was in the middle of an expanse of shaded lawn.
Another favorite place to play was the patch just beyond the cultivated garden, where the trees were spaced close together and the undergrowth left to run wild. The “woods” were a buffer between the fence at the main road and the rest of the property, probably less than 40 x 40 feet, but to us it was an endlessly fascinating place. Turning over logs, looking for wildflowers, watching bugs, we never lacked excitement there.
When our parents were with us, we spent more time in the cultivated garden, where flowers, vegetables, herbs, and fruit grew together. Th>e one place on the property that was in full sun, its air resonated with the hum of happy bees. At the center was a birdbath surrounded by herbs. It wasn't a place for geometric order, but for rampant and flourishing plant life. I still remember how it felt like magic when Aunt Betty would reach into a tangle of plants and pull out a cucumber, or a handful of currants. And then we'd go in the house and have them for lunch! I still feel that magic in my own garden when I pick a ripe vegetable.
It was decades later that I finally got my own patch of soil to tend and evolved into a gardener, but looking at the garden I've created – albeit on a much smaller scale – I notice it has the wild patch, the shady tunnel, and the tangle of flowers, herbs, and edibles.
© 2010 Tanya Kucak