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 an ideal garden that feels like home.
When I was 4, one of my favorite places to go was my Aunt Betty's garden in Plainfield, New Jersey. 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.
The secret of her soft soil was leaf mold. Most of the property was shaded by well-spaced beech trees. Each fall, they dropped prodigious quantities of leaves, which Aunt Betty and Uncle Fred raked to the edge of the lawn where the land sloped steeply down to the Green Brook. After 3-4 years, the leaves had turned into a rich, dark soil amendment. By the time I was 4, the gardens had benefited from at least a decade's yearly additions of leaf mold.
The garden was watered with rainwater, not only directly from the sky, but also collected from roof runoff . 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. In dappled shade within view of the kitchen window, Aunt Betty dug a terrace nearly 2 feet deep, added flagstone for the floor and 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 surrounded by lawn.
Another favorite place to play was a small patch just beyond the cultivated garden, where the trees were spaced close together and the undergrowth left to run wild. To us the woods were an endlessly fascinating place. Turning over logs, looking for wildflowers, watching bugs, we never lacked excitement there.
The cultivated garden, the one place on the property in full sun, hummed with bees visiting the rampant intermingled flowers, vegetables, herbs, and fruit. 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 – on a much smaller scale – I notice it has a wild patch, a shady tunnel, and a tangle of flowers, herbs, and edibles.
© 2021 Tanya Kucak