Perfect Planting Season

Changes in the garden are often more obvious to those not witnessing daily ebbs and flows of growth - my being way has helped me see the progress the past couple of years has made. The above photo (looking north down the dry creek bed towards the eventual pond) almost suggest something of a real Japanese sasso garden might be on its way.

Since I'm only home in the garden for a couple weeks before heading back to the Gulf I am trying to get as much fall planting done as possible. This weekend off to Garden World - ya I know, silly name - but they have an excellent collection of native conifers and near wholesale prices. The perimeter of the garden is missing a couple key shade producers. My goal is to add two Incense Cedars (Calocedrus decurrens) in the far right corner behind the single Hinoki cyprus there now. The trio should visually balance the grove of five Hinokis on the far left corner that were planted two years ago as the initial anchors. (Which after the initial first year heat wave have established themselves and are adding wonderful vertical growth. The soil around them was augmented this past spring with a large crumbling western red cedar log I hauled out of the local forest. That log brought with it all manner of micro-flora and fauna which has helped seed the garden and made life pretty exciting for the increasing number of native birds that use the garden - up to 23 species last count!)

This past week five starter plants of the Pachysandra terminalis (sometimes called Japanese spurge - not my favorite name) were planted in and around the rock work bordering the pebble path (photo above - what it looks like established in the Portland Japanese Garden - and below - my humble beginnings). A few more medium sized stones are yet to be places in this area, but already it "feels" right.

One of the happiest successes has been the way the Equisetum (native horsetail) has adopted to its new setting (photo below). My friend and expert gardener/plant guru cautioned me on transplanting Equisetum. So with great caution I did - prepping the subsurface with weed mat and perforated plastic, and course sand mixed into the poor dirt to enable a moderate degree of standing wetness to simulate a tanic wetland. The future for this area is to take the spill over water from the pond and what water floods down the dry creek bed during rainy spring and fall weather. BTW - this is the native Equisetum that does not invade the world.

One last look (below) at the pebble path and the initial plantings along its edge - still much work to do here, but also want to let the "weediness" take its rightful place naturally.

Weedy Wonder in My Absence

I have always had a passion for ferns, and mosses, and that odd collection of plant-like green things that live in the in between world, things like liverwort, clubmosses, and horsetail. My loving fondness for them is a childhood thing. They were woodland friends, the bed where I would lay, away from the "other" world, and stare into the treetops, the woodland world a living omnimax of life.

The appeal was in their evergreen-ness. Regardless the season they always remind me life was there. Some ferns would fade, impress there fine shape on beds of Polytrichum, but the whole house was moist, the scent of rich humus, fertile.

When I learned their names they were even more enchanting. Rarely such things as stodgy Douglas-this, or obvious color name like white or red something. All the contrary. They were imaginary things - ferns of Deer or Maidenhair, Lace, Lady and Licorice; mosses of Rope and Beak and Broom. So when it came to My garden, this world of green on loan to me for my few years, I knew I needed shade, and wet, and and the scent of decay. There could be no other than a sasso, "weed garden", as Motomi Oguchi calls it, and within it a yarimizu, a small pond and side wetland.

The garden has been happily evolving in its weedy wonder in my absence; these many weeks away on the Gulf Coast. Ferns and mosses and horsetails have erupted. While I have been tracking oil on beaches the sasso has been washed in gentle rain, and mild days, the greens have taken over under an umbrella of cumulus. In every seam and surface a bright flush of fern and mat of moss has begun. Without a a single spade being turned, the garden has begun gifting.

Thank you Jenn for watching over it with great kindness.