I thought I would celebrate Mother's Day by writing a post about the farm, as I've been intending to for some time, and before I go out and resume the repotting of my succulents and other pot plants that I began yesterday. I should have done this a month ago and for some reason did not (I wasn't feeling well at the time, I remember). It's quite pleasant to sit under the wisteria pergola, lifting agaves and sedums and sansevierias from their containers, inspecting the roots wrapped around the inside of the pots, cleaning off exhausted potting soil and dead leaves and repotting my babies in new, nourishing mix with a good watering and setting them to dry and warm in the sun: the start of their new growing year.
Well, the farm. We came originally to Italy for what was supposed to be a two year stay: my husband had retired in the U.S. and we could do what we wanted; it was supposed to be a kind of vacation with work, at the end of which we would return to the U.S. Toward the end of the first year, with incredible frivolity we bought the farm. We had been looking for a house with enough land to make a garden. We went overboard, you might say, acquiring two houses, twenty-odd acres of wood and fields, barns and outbuildings, a lot of weeds and brush and a gigantic work project. The property was not in good shape: the owners were old and not that well off, but I think they weren't very good farmers either, and not good workmen: the land had been exploited, not kept up, and the quality of repairs and maintenance was shoddy. In 2002 we moved here to live. We began to make the garden.
The property is a type common enough in area. It isn't all of a piece, but is a collection of parcels of land that on a map looks like a half-assembled patchwork quilt. The house perches on one corner of the property, in the settlement where our neighbors the dairy farmers also live. Our house is attached to other people's buildings, and, in spite of all our acreage, we have very little land right around our house: a smallish yard which used to be the courtyard of our predecessors' farm; the "vegetable patch" (not currently used for vegetables), which had been used for parking tractors and such; the paved terrace of the second house; the propagating beds a little lower, developed in what used to be the chicken run; the escarpment, a proud name for small but steep drop from the yard to the tractor road that passes below. Beyond this immediate area are the shade garden and the big garden, but more about them later.
Here is the house, June 2007, with the wisteria pergola we built and planted:
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a view of our front yard, on a breezy day in April this year:
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the paved terrace of the second house, around November of last year, during a rainy spell:
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the escarpment in late April of this year, with the Teas and Chinas well into flower:
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and the balcony my husband built on our utility building, with 'Jaune Desprez' and 'Marhal Niel' in the best flowering they've ever had since we planted them in spring of 2003:
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With the exception of two lilacs, a young persimmon, and the bay laurel below the paved terrace that were already here when we arrived, all the ornamental plants were planted by me and my husband. When we bought the property the area shown in the pictures above was gravel and packed clay with weeds, or, in the case of the escarpment, rubble with taller weeds. Where the clothesline is now was a row of low, scorpion-infested brick buildings that blocked the view down the valley. My husband came out weekends and tore them down with a maul, cleaning and stacking the bricks and covering the area with a fresh layer of gravel. A little later I planted a border of common sage grown from seed and tall bearded irises dug up from the side of the road, with a rock garden of lavender and herbs in the corner, and we put up the clothesline. The pergola, balcony, benches, gazebo, porch, terraced beds, are all our work. The grass mostly just happened. It gets greener and thicker every year, and I've begun to mow it and take pride in having a lawn. It dies in the summer and comes back in the fall, lives without water, and gives much satisfaction for very little investment.
Away from the house there are two main garden areas: we call them the shade garden and the big garden. The shade garden is the top part of a narrow strip of land that descends steeply downhill. It's an old slide zone with a drainage running through it that is in the process of turning from brush into woodland. When we began clearing the brush in fall 2002 we discovered that it had also been our predecessors' garbage dump and the site of their burn pile. When my husband realized this he wanted to stop right there, but I told him that the land could belong either to the garbage or to us, and I wanted it to belong to us. So we began clearing. Some hundreds of bags of hauled-away trash later, the shade garden is turning into a sweet spot. It's the coolest and moistest land we have and very pleasant in summer, and a good place to plant clematis and peonies and once-blooming old roses--and the Hybrid Musks there are splendid; we even have three magnolias living and growing here, a satisfaction, though they'll never be champions of their kind. I could never get a satisfactory photograph of the shade garden, but this gives an idea of what it's like:
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The big garden is downhill of the house and includes the Rose Road and several boundary beds planted in roses and companions. It is very much a work in progress, with basic planting of trees and shrubs still in the future, and complementary planting and maintenance without end. This is where we have our roses growing into the woodland, the mini-olive grove (ten trees, on a hillside too dry and rocky to do anything else with), and various other things. Much of the ground is particularly poor here, and I've been happy to see it become more fertile and friendly to life. We have roses flourishing in places where Bermuda grass struggled to get a foothold, and are getting trees started on hostile compact soil: admittedly the trees are only four inches tall, but they're there now, and they'll grow.
First, here is a view out over the valley where we live, taken last summer. The view is down the Rose Road, dormant during the drought, with a glimpse of the big garden below:
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This is the big garden, or rather what we intend to turn into the big garden, late this winter, with the baled hay we use for mulch and a glimpse of the settlement above:{{gwi:259218}}
And finally, a shot taken this morning of the Rose Road, hard to photograph and in need of mowing:
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another shot of a bit of the Rose Road taken off the road, photographed a few days ago:
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and finally, 'Alberic Barbier' last year growing at the edge of the woodland:
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So, to everyone who loves a garden,
Happy Mothers Day!
Melissa
michelle_co
alicia7b
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