No, John, I don't think you are missing anything. In all probability that was the extent of a farmer's garden. The concentration was on vegetables and some fruit bearing trees, bushes and plants. Maybe a few hollyhocks by the outhouse and perhaps a rose bush or two if they were extremely flamboyant. Farm gardens were not about beauty but rather food production that could be eaten, dried, preserved or stored. Although, the wife might have also snuck in a row of zinnias -- not a bed -- a row.

IronBelly

IB:
Thanks. I'll tell her that she should restore the veggie garden to harmonize with the history of the house. The other plantings are basically in place. (I forgot to mention that a couple of rows of daffodils and tulips are coming up along the margin of the lawn and house.)

I use to live in an old farm house in connecticut, there were mostly perennials in strip beds, low almost no maintence. German irises, day lillies, lily of the valley as afoundation planting along the entire shade side, wisteria over the patatoe cellar, and grape vines near and growing onto a large stone fire pit. Pussy Willows,too and foresythia! Asparagus bed was gorgeous!

A NorthWest farmhoouse?
well, maybe you can create what never was based on what has evolved i.e. finding classic NW threads. Here in the NW i tradition would be a short tradition anyway, so tracing threads is possible.
First of course, is the space very open or is it in a wood? It is on a hill but below the ridge with good sightlines to view the farm?...as most farmhouses would be. Is there a verandah? a pond nearby? These are all farm traditions. One nice thing when you have farm animals they eat the grass low and give a wonderful open feeling. I've seen a wonderful house that incorporated a French style walled courtyard with stone walls in the middle of a sheep farm and the non courtyard side of the house has vege gardens on a terrace so the sheep can't jump up and eat it ... the openfeeling is crucial -- probably for any farm house.
Actually rather early in the NW history, esp as the Japanese began coming here, there was a fairly vigorous perennial plant tradition, and there seems to have been a kind of explosion of interest in imported trees about 100 yrs ago, which they planted in groves and allees and all sorts of half formal modes.
Of course there wouldn't be a too dense planting near the house but I lived in an old NW farm house that had a most wonderful garden room, i.e. it was a small unheated bay or linhay I'm not sure what you call it)
closed off with French doors, and with French window
A fancy damn place might well have an esplanade or a tree lined drive. How about a little grotto on site over near the well spring, if it is in the woods, and I've seen a gazebo or two here in the NW esp if the farmer was German. And speaking of German I've seen farmhouses set in the middle of a rather formal rectangle garden fordered by collumnar trees that is quite large.
There could be, of course a cutting garden and even a walled vege garene...
lots of landscape garen to explore
Asha

John-
Scroll down to ilovecounrylife's thread posted on Jan. 23, '04, if you will. Lots of good links to farm garden sites and other pertinent information.

I think the extent of the garden's depended on the interests of the farmer(or his wife!) and the wealth or success of the farm. You don't mention the era of the farmhouse; that would matter. Also, as Asha writes, the nationality/background of the farm family. But plain and simple was the common rule of the day; there were always exceptions. The wealthy farmers in my area often had long drives leading to the farm, lined with beautiful sugar maples, which were tapped for syrup as well as admired for their presence and stately beauty.

In Western NY State's farm country, a perhaps 'typical' farmhouse landscape would have been much as Ironbelly described, with the addition of rows of gladiolas, some big lilacs near the farmhouse entries, and an apple tree or two in the yard. Many Polish immigrants left Buffalo to move to the countryside in Western NY state. They were known for their extremely neat, tidy, well-kept farms. Some had more flower varieties for cutting and enjoyment, apart from the typical zinnias, glads, and German or Dutch flags (iris)of the English-German farmers. There was usually a large, rectangular vegetable garden close to the house, apart from the fields of potatoes, beans, tomatoes, cabbage, or other market crop. Often an asaparagus bed. Nut trees were popular, especially black walnut and butternut. Bee hives were kept in rows in back of the house.along the side of the barn, by some.

These facts are all very regional. If your friend purchases the farmhouse, it would be valuable for her to research who first built the farm and lived in it. What sort of farm was it-family farm or for profit? Dairy? Vegetable? Fruit? What was the etnic background of the farm family? What do neighbors remember about the farm in its working days?

Just some thoughts to pass on to your friend.

Ginger

Thanks for your comments, everyone!

The farmhouse sits on fairly level ground, surrounded by cabbage[seed], potato, and pea fields, alternating with horse and cow pastures. (The region was cleared in the mid-1800s when the valley's old-growth forest of 200+-foot-tall Douglas-firs and redcedars was clear-cut. There is no pond (nor is there room for one, unless she puts one into her front yard.

I'll do a layout drawing later today, show it to her (over lunch), and then post it in the gallery for comments.

John,
I did not quite understand your mention of "cabbage (seed)". Does this mean growing cabbage to maturity for the purpose of collecting seed? If so, your friend should know that the aroma from cabbage fields in the fall lingers for many weeks and just plain stinks. She should consider this before purchasing the farmhouse.

Nandina:
Yes. Cabbages grown for seeds. My friend is a former farm girl and she jests a lot about city folks moving into the country and complaining about unexpected farm aromas. (Cabbage has nothing over living downwind from a dairy farm.) The farm is a couple of fields away from tideflats which can become very redolent on warm summer days. I think she's inured to that.

John, I used to be familiar with the area I think you are talking about just south of Chuckanut Drive. Right? I ran from Fairhaven to Bow without stopping on a bet once when I was attending WWSC. Twenty miles. I won.
I lived on several farms when I was a kid and IronBelly has it right. Farm gardens were mainly about food. The 'man' of the household would put up with a few flowers for his wife to keep her happy and those were usually in a straight line. The trees were fruit, except a Locust or two, and the garden was vegetable. Since most farmers moved here to the PNW from the northern midwest, a Lilac or two was usually included to remember back home.
I lived on a cabbage farm north of Spokane and remember walking home from Orchard Prairie school through the orchards and cabbage fields in the fall and breaking off a chunk of cabbage from a split one and eating it like an apple. They sure were sweet! In that part of the country the cabbages didn't smell much after harvesting because it was too cold for fermentation.
Your friend has very good ground and can grow just about anything suitable for this climate. Drainage may be a problem for certain times of the year however. I would go modern and forget the farm garden. Things have improved since then and now the choices are unlimited.
I used to live near Puget Sound south of Edmonds and I miss the smell of the beach when the tide was out.

Bo:
Thanks! It's always nice to get a personal angle. I will tell to forget about restoration and to just plant away and have fun.

you've gotta get an outhouse and plant hollyhocks around it......maybe use it for a tool shed

We discussed the project over lunch, and I passed on your comments. She's torn between leaving it as it is (since she now thinks of the status quo as "authentic") or changing it to fit her taste. I think she'll change it. (She did give me the go ahead for a redesign. I'll keep you posted.)

Here is a link that might be useful:

Don't give up the lunchtime 'job' John.

ACJ:
Talking in riddles again?

(I should point out that I work by choice, not by necessity.)

John,
It sounds like it is a house with a good sense of presence. So identifying these design themes that are already present is, as I see it, the pivotal themes to extend and enhance. this can be done in a completely non traditional way, but one that, if you wish, remind one strongly of tradition. However even if they were to be done with a very contrasting postmodern sense or a deeper ecological sense, still since it is the poetic geometry that you are drawing out.
Naturally most people of the bygone era in farm country Washington didn't make garden-landscape, i.e. didn't strongly develop the sense of place, partly because it was already there and partly because they were developing/evolving it rather than intentionally interacting with it.
i.e. Over the millennia, had these farms just been farmers eventually they would produce a beauty more definable and more projectable. If projectable is a word, then that is what design is.
So there is a garden there now, and you client/friend can certainly bring something to it ... the sense that she and you have as you approach the garden/farm is like a measuring stick with which to rule things in or out.
As long as this measuring stick is used then you can create any number of possibilities from a formal to a Capability Brownism, to a rustic ... this is the essoins of abstract expressionism, i.e. that you can paint in the abstract even inner personal abstractions and that is no different from painting a tree that you see and like ... the principles are there, the poetic geometry is there.
So this is a different way of restoration ... it is however certainly a restoration. If you want to change something that you feel, i.e. after your design is completely there and in the ground and a new person comes, or they should have this same feeling that she has now, only it is more identifiable ... Whether or not it looks the same ... many historical restorations have the problem that though they have precisely restored the look the feeling has been lost. The former is authentic, the later is reproduction.
- Asha

Asha:
Once again you have grasped the setup perfectly. What concerned me -- and I convinced my friend to watch out for this -- is that she could easily fall into the trap you identified: "though they have precisely restored the look the feeling has been lost. "

I am beginning to wonder if a major difference between a farm house garden and the average twentieth century American urban garden is that the "bones" of an urban garden were too often hurriedly plunked down by the builder and often too little modified by the families living in the home, while a farm house garden is a project of may generations. Each generation contributed a little -- a shrub or two, perhaps a tree or hedge. Flower beds and vegetable gardens are ephemeral on a farm, since they can easily be plowed up and disced and harrowed into different configurations.

Farm house gardens, I have found, rarely belong to one particular period, but straddle several periods -- some were started more than a century ago and have been altered and maintained ever since.
So this is what she is going to do -- slowly: She will leave the front yard mostly untouched, except for extending the white rail fence of the front yard to the vegetable patch (and planting climbing roses to eventually cover the rails).

Right now, the backyard is unfenced. It is an area of coarse grass/broadleaf plants (I'm deliberately avoiding the term "weeds") studded with berry bushes and partly protected by an evergreen windbreak. She will enclose it with a white picked fence and add two garden arches with gates: One between the house and the barn and another opening from the backyard to the veggie patch (which will be separated from the vegetables by the white picket fence). She will plant climbing roses next to the arches. She may add a pond later.

Beyond that, the design will stay deliberately vague for the next year or two. I travel a lot professionally, and I will keep my eyes open for farm house gardens that have aged well. If I see something I like, I'll take a photo of it (in many cases I'll be able to go back during different seasons). If she likes it, too, we'll see if it fits into the setting of her garden (with the help of some creative photo montage). By the end of a decade (she will retire on the property and is not planning to move again) she will have a true farm house garden that is both flamboyant and demure, colorful and understated, in all the right places.

This is going to be a very exciting project for me.

Sorry, Asha; you are taking a fork in this road I'm not going to travel. This is a point that I believe we are taking landscape design just a bit too far. The farmers that settled these land parcels would have seen your suggestions as just plain wasteful. In their parlance, strides would be taken to distance themselves from these notions because waste was considered a sin. These were a very goal driven folk. Their goal was survival. Their pride was the livestock and the crops they produced and moral values. This left no spare time for frivolous pursuits. Frivolous pursuits, in the early years, included wasting time on education past the sixth grade. Essentially, the only way you got ahead was to work harder and/or work more which meant all the kids were needed in the fields. The family patriarch would have taught his family well that; "We have plenty of money for the things we need but have no money for things that we want."

While these attitudes may have disappeared in urban areas, they largely remain alive and well in rural areas. You value landscape design -- they value other things. I certainly believe that each point of view is of equal merit. While some might see their homesteads as stark and lacking, I see them as a rich expression that truly defines who they are and what they believe. I would venture to say that most people steeped in urban life lack enough background knowledge about agrarian pursuits to form an intelligent conclusion -- just as those rural people would have lacked enough background information to understand the value of what you propose.

Much like the story line in the classic little book, The Richest Man In Babylon, we often fail to see the value and beauty of that which is near. I find it amusing that we will laude praise on the starkness of Japanese gardens yet remain totally oblivious to the stark beauty inherent in rural Americana.

IronBelly

I suppose you could just plant cottage garden type plants.... (all casual).... I think it is the best idea to plant the garden against some type of wall.... a brick red barn would be nice with some bright white wheel or something..... Sunflowers, shirley poppies, echinaceas, rudbeckias, eupatorium, maybe some old garden roses..... Mostly perennials and annuals I'd say.... less shrubs.... nothing manicured..... some annuals grown in old rusty pots or watering cans.......

I've been on the road for several days, on assignment. But I've had a change to look at a few farm house gardens (most of them as I was driving by.)

One thing I have noticed is that farms with big well-maintained old barns, new metal-sided sheds, and lots of modern farm machinery rarely have fancy shrub and flower gardens, while farm houses surrounded by cottage gardens usually have upscale cars parked in their driveways (with little or no farm machinery in sight).

I've also noticed that many (if not most) farm houses in the wheat and range lands east of the Cascade mountains in OR and WA are shaded by tall black locust trees (which are not native to the Pacific Northwest). In fact, you can spot the location of abandoned farmhouses by these clumps of trees, which seem to be doing just fine without help from man (once they're established). Many of the trees marking former homesteads are topped with big hawk nests.

john,
I didn't know that black locust was not native here ... who planted all those growing in odd clumps and groves?
For me it is sad, that I can't get at the nursery, nice old locust like that cause I love the look that they give around old farmhouses, which you say have no gardens.. they are a wondrful romance.

No Gardens? Maybe you drive too fast! A quick glance reveals but little and the unfamiliar (to some) machines stand out against the sky ... lost is the often the obvious, the what a house is sited, lost is the bit of shade which almost looks like a wild apple or oak or locust.
Rather I think it is true what you said earlier about farms being beings which are developed over time... i.e. over time the dreams emerge which were hidden in the cattle pond and barn, and entry road and the curious little extenuation of the house and odd gable here and there e wide verandah. I remember my grandfathers verandah. He lived in Green City Missouri. Still too small to be heard of Milan which is too small to be hear of outside of Saint Joe. My Grandfather was as strict and straight as Edward Hoopers painting. But his house had was the enormous Victorian with this wide verandah. Verandah's do not face walls for parking lots, whatever they face is, to the owner, a garden.
You'd think that these farmers had no reveries of delight, but I can attest to the contrary. As my grandfather was the town undertaker, out in the middle of nowhere in the middle of nowhere (repetition intneded) where he was the town undertaker he buried everyone, even if they didn't have the money. That is what you do. So people anyway gave him little treasured items, mostly of little or no value. He kept them all. Later we learned that the large tiffany lamp collection was worth something! yes these dirt poor farmers in the middle of nowhere had Tiffany lamps!
But if you want real anti-frivolousness such as Iron Belly would humorously believe is the case in the Midwest plain, you should have lived with me on an old Shaker farm. Who is less frivolous than the Shakers ... their furniture and song is, of course, paraised and prised for it's beauty!!! And even thier landscapes were a great beauty.... or is a garden only a place which has shrubs lined up by Gertrued Jykell!!!! indeed the fmouis English Cottage garden is one of these farmers gardens that 100 yrs ago tat i suppose IB would have called NOT a Garden!!!! and i suppose you would have not noticed it as anything but a bit of unkepmptness of the poor. ???
But if all a garden is is a collection of trinkets from the mall, a "makeover" of the deathly consumerism of the type mostly adored on TV shows ... then ii agree those gardens are not to be found in the dreams of farmers, you will not see the traces of garden chachka there ... but dreams? Dreams wander the streets of even windswept Midwest cities much as the ghosts of Chief Sealth's ancestors roam the alleyways of the Northwest. Dreams like seeds must be searched out for they are hidden in the soil ... but it doesn't mean they don't grow fantastic flowers.
And if you slow down on the NW roads you will see many old farmhouses (and new), i mean real farmers, with gardens of many types. Somehow Mt. Vernon, WA. is a hotbed of farm gardens worth seeing. Certainly it is hard to disparage Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World as a dreamless old house on a hill. You might wish to call it too picturesque but if these farmhouses have any quality of the precious (cute or picturesque) it is because quite a treasure is there to be seen ... the whole damn thing is a garden, not just the cute little rose stuck in the front.
There is a wonderful movie by Sting, I forget the name where he pokes fun at the Midwestern American plainness. He begins by saying that these people are all in a box and the landscape is boring, but in the end the closer you get to the folk of this small town the more unusual and unique and fabulous these people get...
But lest this seem all practicality vs. beauty ... well there is no practicality which is practical at all that is not elegant and rich with beauty. The root of making something really beautiful is to make something invaluably practical. A joyous reverie of beauty is the first step in good engineering ... and the last is an honest beauty. A farmer, quintessentially, is engineer grounded in dreams grown in beauty.
... damn the trinkets which infest TV makeovers.
Asha

John, I've supplied a link that shows a 'traditional' farm garden where the family's (my own) entire food source was self-grown. It's taken from an elevation, so you can't see explicit details. By the way, there were both flower gardens & veggie gardens.

Here is a link that might be useful: {{gwi:1186452}}

Asha:
No, I have not been racing past the farm houses at too high a speed. I'll have to think this through and clarify it after I get back home. But I think I'm onto something.

Back Yard Guy:
Thanks for posting the pic. We don't disagree -- it's just a matter of phrasing. (I'm working on that.)

Back to the sagebrush, junipers, snow . . . . and black locusts.

byg
beautiful place to live
thanks for the picture
-a

Larry-
Practical and beautiful design. I like the curved fence by the right side of the driveway, too. Thanks for putting the photo up. A nice companion to the one of you and your brothers in the flower garden.
G.

Hi--

Just wanted to ask you to take a look at my "family farm series" in the gallery of this forum to see my grandmother's landscaping. It shows the same site in circa 1915, 1929, and summer and winter of 1994. When they built the new house in 1922, they leveled the spot for the house to sit on and made a double terrace out of the ground that used to have a gentle slope south. Then they planted the bridal wreath that you can see in the photos. Sorry I didn't get the sequence right--hadn't posted pictures before and didn't know you couldn't do all of them at once. Please read my narrative accompanying the fourth one. Thanks

Egyptianonion

The double terrace effect with spireas is interesting. I like the sepia tone photos, too.

Some questions:
-What sort of farm was it when it was a working farm?
-Do you grow organic vegetables, flowers, herbs for sale or your own use?
-What do you have in your "rainbow garden" now?
-Are you continuing to do any hx restoration work or have you decided to do what seems appropriate for our times? I like your pithy "Some things change, some things stay the same." Indeed!

Ginger

Ginger, thanks for your interesting questions.

Sort of farm--During my growing-up years when my father ran it (I was born in '51), it was basically a hog and grain farm. He grew lots of corn for the pigs and to sell, plus some oats, but started growing soybeans in the sixties as a cash crop as well. We had a few chickens early on, but found it more convenient to buy at the store. (I think even store-bought chicken used to taste better back then.) My mother was a city girl from 200 miles away and hadn't inherited the gardening genes of her father. She did like to grow yellow wax beans and freeze them, which we all enjoyed. During my father's growing up it was much more diversified. At present, having retained about a third of the acreage, 122 acres, our renter/manager/neighbor specializes in grain--soybeans and corn.

Organic veggies?--I've gradually gone to organic and permacultural gardening for fun. I really love fruit, and since my husband and I can be on the farm only three months of the year (we teach up in Alaska and fly our Cessna down every year), time is at a premium. Therefore, perennial edibles are my priority, with maybe a few yellow wax beans. So I've planted fruit trees and small-fruit shrubs, asparagus, rhubarb, hardneck garlic (not really perennial, of course), garlic chives, and (my namesake) Egyptian onions, plus many other kinds of herbs.

All of these are just jumbled together for a permacultureal type of system, though I do plant them in such a way as to enhance the ability to mow around them. In the east garden, for instance, I planted over the years three rows of fruit trees, plus another row of currants, rhubarb, and grapes. In between the trees, I planted within the rows all kinds of herbaceaous plants, for organic companion reasons, but also so that I could just run the mower all the way up and down without having to go around each individual tree. (I initially scoffed at the by-word "easy to mow around," but soon incorporated it into my criteria of good gardening once I actually started mowing.)

Rainbow garden--
Blue:
blue flax
Darker blue:
Veronica austriaca 'Crater Lake Blue'
Annual blue salvia that either survive or reseed every year, c.r.n. (can't remember name)--Victoria?
Purple:
annual reseeding larkpur, Consolida ambigua
Veronica spicata 'Blue Peter'
Veronica 'Sunny Border Blue'
Salvia X Superba 'Blue Hill'
Salvia 'Superba Blue Queen'
Red:
Ground cover rose 'Red Ribbons' (Jackson & Perkins)
Dianthus, 'Flashing Light' and 'Brilliant'
Orange:
Asclepias tuberosa
Gaillardia, 'Goblin' and a bigger c.r.n.
Gold:
Coreopsis, tall c.r.n.
Rudbeckia fulgida 'Goldsturm'
Yellow:
Achillea filipendula
Coreopsis 'Zagreb'
Green:
Juniper horizontalis 'Plumosa Youngstown'
Euphorbia cyparissias (am phasing out as juniper grows)

Historical restoration--As I view pictures that go all the way back to 1900, I see many changes, including the location of fences, the coming and going of huge trees, and in the ground itself as I describe before with the double terracing. And yet there are still a couple of barns and a corn crib that endure. Times change and new personalities come in.

My blood link to the past allows me to both have some knowledge of the past, as well as the capability of gathing more knowledge from pictures, written material, and friends and neighbors whose relationships with the family go back for generations. I cherish this, and often repeat plantings to mimic the past.

Yet I can't put it all back and I don't feel the need. As long as I have the family blood, the farm is still evolving as the family farm. I try to do it justice, and though I enjoy it tremendously myself, I'm really only borrowing it from the next generation, whether it goes to my nieces (we're child-free) or whether it changes over to a whole new set of genes.

Please check out the gallery again as I will soon have some more pictures in it.

Egyptianonion

Thank you for the answers, Egyptianonion. Quite a "formula" you shared for a rainbow garden, too, if anyone reading wants to try creating one.

Yours is a beautiful description of family history as it changes and makes its way thru the land, farming, and gardening. (I see you have kept planting yellow beans!) Very essential: blood and soil.

Hope others will find your story at the bottom of this thread and the accompanying photos in the gallery. I wonder if it might be more useful to post your own thread with reference to your farm and photos ("History of a Family Farm, with Photos" or some such title?); more people would then have the opportunity to follow along as you post pics and more information in the future.

G.

Hello, E-O:
Just looked at all of your new photos. Please do post a stand-alone thread about your farm and photos so they don't get lost, mixed in with this thread. Wonderful photos - the progression of the farm's history unfolds in front of your eyes.

I especially like your use of the cement pillars, and the "jumble" or thicket type bed that looks so natural in your "South Garden" photo (I think that was the one . . .)
The rainbow garden is showcased by being placed on the terrace, too.

Ginger

Ginger--Thanks for your comments. Yeah, maybe I could even learn how to do a website. The ether's a whole new medium for me.
Egyptianonion

E-O,
My appreciation, too, for your time in posting your pictures of your farm. Your three months/year spent there must be idyllic and rejuvenating to your sense of familial connection.
Tessa