Garden Life: Today’s dreams are tomorrow’s designs

The new year brings with it a clean slate and a chance to rethink our intentions for the year ahead.

Spring will once again follow winter. The seasons of summer and fall will come again. The dates of the calendar repeat themselves but experience assures us that no day in nature is exactly like any day before.

Change is inevitable. Some we will initiate on our own and some will happen despite our personal agenda.

All who garden do so individually, even if we garden with a partner or a group of fellow gardeners. We put ourselves into every shovelful of compost that blankets the beds and borders for winter. With every seed we place in the earth, we instill our personal vision of a future flower. We plant the golden, peppery nugget of a nasturtium seed with thoughts of spicy orange, red and yellow blooms. Our thoughts will one day become our garden.

For me, part of the creative process of gardening is to give names to beds, borders and other areas of the garden. It helps me to see what I am thinking. Years ago, I began to call our property “Scout’s Run” in honor of our noble collie boy, Scout. It has been a few years now since Scout passed on and a couple more since he actually ran through the garden. Still, his spirit pervades my morning garden walks and afternoon work parties with friends.

With tongue-in-cheek, I named another area of the garden the “Red Maple Glenn Dale Dell.” My initial vision for this garden space was of a small, grass-floored room. What I really wanted to create was the feeling of a magical, childhood place, like a small glade in Narnia or a meadow in Oz. The name was my way of resolving a lifelong perplexity over the terms used to describe a small, usually wooded valley or hollow.

A mysterious place such as this required a sense of privacy and enclosure. With that in mind, I added a low, surrounding berm of soil that fashioned a gentle, gradual slope so that the grassy floor would eventually form a shallow bowl of green lawn. In summer, the four Japanese maples, for which the area is also named, further enclose the space with a delicate canopy of mahogany. In the evening, the setting sun backlights the fine-fingered foliage in a bonfire of flaming reds.

One of the most enlightening revelations in gardening is that we can continue to modify the texture of every idea that we have. We can, if we wish, make intricate floral tapestries from the thread of perennials, shrubs, trees and vines. The Japanese art of bonsai teaches us that simplicity itself can be continually fine-tuned.

By simply adding a fork to an established garden pathway and taking a few steps to the left, I was able to first envision a secret glen, dale, or dell and then, over time, create one in my own garden.

Although the space appears to be an informal circle, it is based in architectural reality on a square formed by the four maples at each amorphous corner. If an X were drawn on the ground between the four trees, the line would intersect at the center of the lawn where a large cedar bird feeder sits on an eight-foot tall post. The surrounding berm is planted with a casual mix of native snowberry, ferns and Nootka roses that give the area a sense of structure through the leanest season of the year.

Of course, all these thoughts and ideas are nothing more than my personal musings. What really matters is that a family of ring-tailed doves finds this area of the garden to their liking. For many years now, in spring and summer, they have graced the decks of the bird feeder with their presence. When they set off in flight, the distinct, hollow echo of their flapping wings brings the final picture to animate life.

Many visitors never make it to this area of the garden. There is a lot to see and we all have our own specific interests when touring someone else’s garden.

As the New Year commences, I will take advantage of nature’s continuous cycle and begin again.

Robb Rosser is a WSU-certified Master Gardener. Reach him at Write2Robb@aol.com.