Flâneur Gardening

I’ve set my alarm clock so I can be in town to pick up the rental car at 8AM sharp when the rental company opens, and then I’ll hurry home and start filling up the car with as much as possible before driving down to the house for 12PM when the estate agent will be there to do the meter readings and hand over the keys.

It feels very surreal that in 14 hours I’ll be outside my house, waiting for the estate agent to let me in and then leave me there.

Alone.

In my house. Set in my garden. Surrounded by fields on all sides.

It’s a little bit scary to think what I’ve thrown myself into. Renovating the summer house after the flood in December 2013 was such a huge project, and this house is in a way a bigger project because I will not only be ripping things out myself, but also replacing them myself, rather than affording to have builders do it.

But… If I feel happy when I stand outside that house tomorrow at noon, perhaps it will be worth a bit of stress and some aching muscles and joints.

I don’t know if I can sleep tonight. Who cares about Christmas; tomorrow I get a HOUSE!!!

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When I visited my grandmother on Sunday, I took the chance to walk around her garden a few times. Sadly she doesn’t walk very well any more so she couldn’t join me, but I wanted to see what I wanted to “poach” from her garden in early spring.

(And walking gardens in November is when it comes in handy to have grown up with a mother and a grandmother who are both avid gardeners, because I can still see what’s what more or less, even when there are just a few withered leaves on the perennials.)

She is very happy to pass plants on to me, of course, because she can hardly walk and hardly see any more, and also she has this autumn become so frail that she doesn’t really go out unto her terraces without company. And she knows how much I enjoyed having some literal heirloom plants in the old garden and how plants from her garden are more important to me than the fanciest stuff I could buy in a plant store.

Some areas of her garden would be more sensitive to poaching than others. Because she doesn’t walk much these days, she will probably never make it into the lower part of her garden again, so that’s where I can really do my poaching without her or – more importantly, given her poor eye sight – her guests ever noticing. I want the upper garden around the house to still look nice and lush and presentable.

Still, some plants from the upper garden won’t show if I poach a huge quantity of them, especially her geraniums and her wild strawberries. They have such rampant growth that I can take as many as I want and it will still look lush a few weeks later, even to a 20/20 vision guest!

In the lower garden there are some asters and daisies I could use, and of course lots and lots of biannuals like evening primrose.

When I do poach/collect these plants, an interesting thing is that because my grandparents created this garden more or less from scratch, the original plans exist and were routinely updated until my grandfather died, so I can get actual species names for almost every single plant by consulting those plans. That is, I believe, a rarity when getting plants from established gardens.

My grandmother is, I hope, not much longer in this world. She is a kind and generous and loving person, and I hope that one morning she just won’t wake up. She is still mentally present to a great extent (okay, she repeats herself, but what she says is sensible and interesting) but her body is failing. And she is quite open about looking forward to dying.

Apart from getting some great plants for free, what I’ll also get is my own history imprinted on my little plot of land. A sense of belonging by virtue of sharing the garden with plants from my grandmother’s garden. I believe we’ll all be very happy in the rich soil of the island of Lolland!

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I’m spending the day imagining things…

It’s been so long since I saw the garden – and I only saw it twice, so I have a very vague concept of what the layout really is and what it looks like, apart from an old aerial from when global online mapping began.

Still, it gives me a map of where the buildings and the main trees/shrubs are. Judging by the shadows, this picture was taken around 5pm, and the vegetable garden is clearly where it ought to be but some larger shrubs will have to come down to open up the garden. Also, the Eastern side of the garden is very open, which means I could plant fruit trees there to benefit from the shelter of the high trees on the Western side without their shade.

The prevalent wind in Denmark is from the west, so the trees on the Western edge will be staying – at worst I’ll top-cut some of them, though really they seem to be in proportion to the garden so for now they can remain as they are. In this surrounding of fields it’s quite nice to have some tall trees – and of course the big tree by the drive is an absolute treasure.

I want to go completely mad with the front garden. (It’s already a little bit mad with that low wall and the ornamental concrete balls… The balls might have to go, or perhaps I’ll embrace them in time.) I want to get rid of the shrubs, and then I’m considering filling the space with either roses, peonies or daylilies. A big, brash, show of flowers, and considering its south-south-eastern exposure I suspect it to be quite a prime plot in the garden, even if I’ll rarely enjoy it myself. When looking out of the front room windows, the eye is drawn not to the front garden, but to the rolling fields on the other side of the road and the church tower in the distance…

Inside the garden proper, though, the white square nearest the house on the aerial photo is a caravan and its awning. That needs to go. Further down the garden (i.e. further North, so “up” in the picture) is a large shed built of cinder blocks and with a roof partially in rusty metal and partially in white polycarbonate. To the south of it is a lean-to in white polycarbonate that currently houses the wood store, but there would be room for this inside the shed so I could get rid of this and use the south-facing wall for anything that might need that little bit of extra warmth.

(Or, y’know, if I’m dreaming… Building a small lean-to greenhouse…)

The main shrub/tree that will need to go is the one just to the north of one corner of the house. Partly because it makes the garden seem smaller when viewed from the house and partly because it blocks a lot of light into the “garden room” – an indoor-outdoor room built on to the house with access through the small sitting room that will eventually be part of the kitchen.

Cutting down those shrubs and digging up the roots will also mean a large hole in the ground will have to be dug anyway, so… Pond? As the garden itself is fairly flat but slopes marginally away from the house, this would mean I would have a pond at the head of the stream, which is obviously not the standard way of doing a stream in a garden, but I think it could work. It would mean I could have all the “business” tucked away at the end of the stream (pump, filter and so on), rather than near the pond itself.

I loved my “Puddles” in the old garden, but they definitely gave me a taste for more. Not that the local area is lacking in water areas, as there are lots of small lakes and bogs only a few hundred meters to the north of the new garden, but of course that also means that if I create a pond and a stream through the garden, animals WILL come in absolutely no time. And this can just be on a completely different scale from The Puddles, which should make it easier to manage the ecosystem. (Also, if I’m a bit clever I can lead the rainwater from the shed roof into the lower pond so the system tops itself up automatically… It’s around 30 square metres/300sqf of roof, so that should give an ample water supply.)

The Puddles in the old garden were just plastic tubs sunk into the ground with tiny solar-powered pumps to provide a little water movement, but for an actual stream I obviously need something a bit more powerful, which is why it’s actually quite handy to have the lower pond at the back of the garden. Because no, I won’t be wasting fossil-fuel-based electricity on a water feature in my garden. It will once again be a solar-powered pump, but this time I will need a larger pump – and a larger panel. And who wants to look at solar panels? Sure, it means there will not always be a continuous flow in the stream, but as the garden is nearly flat it can be designed to look all right even when the water is not moving.

I had so much fun with The Puddles. Building them, planting around them, seeing how life took hold in them… It was so rewarding, and I want to do the same in the new garden. Only… This time the only limit is my physical ability to dig!

I may or may not have gone a bit silly and already ordered the pump system for this project. Mind you, my silliness does have its boundaries so I shan’t order the pond liner until the ponds and the stream have been dug out. There was just an offer I couldn’t refuse… (Because I am weak!)

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