CHAPTER III : THE OVAL

THE OVAL

When I moved onto the land there was no Oval Garden. 

What was there was unappealing and not much to look at.  From the house, what i could see was a tall 8 foot high fence with behind it a dilapidated trailer.   In it lived an older couple who had been given the right to live there for the rest of their lives.  The couple had moved there in 1968, the closing days of the Camp.   Rip van Winkle Camp for Catholic Boys was started here on the land in 1919 and went out of business, deep in debt, in 1968.  It was the era of hippies and flower power.  Kids didn't want to go to summer camp any longer and the Camp died.

This lovely elderly couple had been hired as the groundskeepers but there was very little for them to do.  After bankruptcy, the main house became home first to groups of local hippies from Woodstock, 15 miles away and then to three couples from the City with heaps of children.  When I arrived in High Falls in 1982, the main house was in deplorable state, caused more by lack of interest and investment than structural weakness.  

When the caretaker couple died unexpectedly, the plot became available to me as a blank canvas.  I had been mixing paints on my imaginary palette for many years before that.  The place where the trailer stood was very central part of the land and I had been making great plans for it for many years.

Here was the chance to start a complete and new garden from scratch.  The borders I had been putting together and laying out before were more like small plots that somehow got linked because I needed space for the 'new' plants I had bought.  

The dimensions of the space that became available were roughly 25 by 35 meters (75 by 105 feet).  By any standard that is impressive for a plot you want to cultivate by yourself, but size has never intimidated me.  The house that came with the land had 22 rooms in it and I loved the idea to tackle all of those too. 

It was not only the plot itself that became available but also the area behind it up until the edge of the woods that was to be part of the new garden lay-out.

 

Where the stone wall is now at the far end of the Oval, the land came down in a slope.  A bulldozer cut away the slope in the shape of a crescent.  From the small blue stone quarry 500 meters from the house, a friend and i gathered enough stone to build the retaining dry wall. The stones from this little quarry are very flat not bulky, which makes it easy to stack them on top of each other.  We picked up each stone and puzzled it into place.  

The stones are stacked on top of each other without cement.  Hence the name dry wall. It is built leaning back into the earth so as to push back the pressures of the soil behind it.  The back of the stone wall is filled with rubble to make it one with the earth.  All walls in upstate New York are built that way.  Even the foundations of houses.  Along many narrow country roads here there are miles and miles of drywall stone hedges gathered and built by farmers hundreds of years ago to prepare the grounds for cultivation.

The final phase of the wall structure were the stone steps themselves.  They are thick cut slabs of blue stone and are very heavy.  With some leverage and my trusted pick axe I managed to put them into place and when I was finished I was awed by the majesty of it.  A structure made out of unwieldy rough stone poured and puzzled into a curved, almost moving, form.

With the outer edge of the new garden drawn, making and building a new garden was next.  I first had to finish the final shape of the garden.  It did not have a final shape yet, only the outer semi-circular edge.  Principles of design often suggest to mirror an existing shape and that is what we did.  We flipped the crescent over to make an Oval.  Question was how big to make it because I knew I was not going to hire garden staff to do the real work.   I decided to make it big.  I like big.

In the woods surrounding the garden, barberry bushes grow far and wide.  They are indigenous and the waxy red berries of autumn make them easy to propagate anywhere.  The bushes have short sharp thorns on wiry branches and once established form an impenetrable shield.  A good defense against invasive deer and when clipped tightly a sharply drawn frame for the garden to shine in.

The transplanted barberry established themselves within a year and formed a dense magnificent hedge within three. 

Of course the Oval started out as a very young garden, with nothing growing in it.  Because it was so big to begin with and to make it manageable,  it was essential to divide it into parts, each part separated by a path.   Seven paths in total, and each part given a name, from Primus through Septimus.  

When  a garden is young it has no soul because nothing of substance is there other than good intentions and great plans.  It has no character or personality yet.   It may have its architectural elements which is nice when seen from the sky, but its population, the plants, have not developed enough to make a statement.

The enormity of the project requires patience.   Time is what makes a garden.  If I plant a 3 year old purple beech 6 feet tall, it will not establish its persona until about 15 years later when it becomes a strong but still young silhouette in its environment.

A young garden has no story, no history.  Nothing has grown or bloomed here before.   The locus has no past.  A locus is essential in a garden to identify the location.  "I'm by the weeping peach.  I need to pull the weeds by the roses behind the stone bench in the Alpha Garden."  The spot becomes the identifier, essential to the garden.

I prefer to spend my time where the trees are old,  the plantings established, sculpted into the environment, old piles, weathered things.

The Oval had none of that in the early years.  It is new, young and inexperienced. There have been no major disasters or victories here. Yet.

As with the planting of a tree, the Location of the Oval itself was the result of a visual inspection. 

What I did is what I do whenever I introduce a new plant or tree into the High Falls Garden.   I look up and imagine myself to be the newly introduced plant in our home and determine whether I can be happy in this spot.  Will I have all the rain I need?  Will I have all the sun I need?  Will I get enough shade?

I'll look around and see where the sun is at what time of day.  If there is an area exposed to the rosy fingered dawn, then that will be a good spot for roses, evaporating the morning dew moist and prevent mildew.  If there is a spot that gets the focus of the 3 o'clock sun, that will be a good spot for a gray and drought resistant garden.

As the years progress, each site will develop its own character and distinctiveness.  These will become local traits, the uniqueness of a certain corner in the garden.  The plants in that nook will get to know each other, learn to appreciate their neighbors and coexist with them.  Respect the Invasive Ones, give them the room they claim or wait till I pull them out. Overshadow the weaker ones.  Until they perish.

PATHS, SHAPES, EDGES & FRAMES

It is easy to have a good-looking border in June, but not so easy in March or October.

When I created the borders in the Oval, I did not want to give all prominence to the flowers themselves but rather emphasize the architectural structure they grow in.

Flowers do not last so long.  Two weeks, sometimes three. 

But, the foliage of the plants, the shapes of the leaves and the outline of the plant itself is what lingers year round and these can maintain should.

You can play with bold foliage contrasts or similarities.  Juxtapose the pointed leaves of Siberian Iris with the soft Euchera ones or the refined Astilbe leaves, with Catnip Nepeta or Aquilegia Columbine foliage.  One thing I will do next year, is move a bleeding heart next to a tree peony.  The shape and soft matte bluish green coloring of the leaves of both is striking.  Their flowers are all beautiful but ephemeral.  Their foliage long lived. 

When a painter finishes his 'work', he will put it in a frame because the frame will focus attention on what is contained inside.  In a garden, it is the same with flowers.  A strong architectural framework will draw attention to what is inside the edges or the hedges. 

Once the outside lines are drawn, once you have completed the design, it doesn't really matter what you put inside the frame, within the lines, within the architecture.  The most important aspect has been completed.  The shape of the border or the shape of the entire garden is there.  Anything you put inside will look good.

Most frames in the Oval's interior and also in the Garage Garden are boxwood.  They have a long history here in High Falls.  When many years ago a friend and I returned home from a Four Freedom Awards lunch in Hyde Park, NY, we were given two centerpieces whose base consisted mainly of boxwood sprigs.  I stuck each stem in the ground without ceremony or assistance and found that they all took vigorous root.  Whenever I clipped the young hedges into shape the following years, I'd pick up the cuttings and stick them in the ground.  They have come to characterize large sections of the garden.   

And in a snow covered garden, they are the only living thing visible.  An excellent return on investment.  

Working in the Oval is special.
It is the aesthetic center of the garden but also the ''high maintenance area'.
The place where I love to spend time, work, sweat and come up with sweet ideas.
There is no better place on the globe than here.
This really is heaven.
And I'm in charge of maintenance.......

CHAPTER II : The Ponds

There are three ponds in High Falls.  Alpha, Beta and Gamma, each a little smaller than the other. 

Alpha is the larger of the three and the one I dug first. 

Were the ponds there when you moved to High Falls? 

I was aware there was a little spring fed stream or rather a dribble, in the back of the garden.  I did not really pay any attention to it, ignorant as I was of the significance of an unlimited water supply on the grounds. 

The stream flowed from a spring house on a knoll in the rear through a part of the garden I used to describe as T&M, "thistles & mosquitoes".  Imagine how it felt to be there.  Walking around meant stretching your hands in front of you for protection and moving thorned branches that had not seen a person in decades, away from your face.

As long as the water was a moving stream, it was difficult to harness and control it.  Dutch boy that I was, I built a muddy dam with my hands and feet and 10 minutes later looked at a mini puddle pond three feet in diameter.  

What a great idea.  Now I could control the water. 

In general, we have no control over when it rains or when it is dry.  If you have no control over these basics and must cede it to nature, you have no control over the artificial environment of the garden.  But with an unlimited water supply at my disposal, all of that would change.  The next week, a big earth mover started to dig a hole that covered the complete back area by the spring house and after a while there was a real pond there:  Alpha. 

While digging, the bulldozer made a huge racket as its teethed bucket scraped over the Catskill bedrock, cleared a ramp into the deepest parts of the pond and exposed a trove of Devonian era fossils, the most magnificent of which was a coiled cephalopod. - roughly 380 million years old.  Every time I walk into the pond on a hot summer day, I touch the old fossil with my bare feet.  And even better, I walk on solid rock instead of the mucky bottom you'd expect in a natural pond. 

We carved out a small island in the northern edge of Alpha to break monotony and planted a Cercidiphylum Japonicum Pendulum or Katsura tree, related to the American Redbud, in the middle of it.  The physical description read it "liked its feet wet" so what better place to plant it than on its own island. 

But after 4-5 years the tree outgrew the island with no further room for its roots to grow.  To save the tree, I added a land bridge turning the island into a peninsula and giving the Cercidiphylum all the room to connect its root system to the dry mainland.

The ponds are fed by their own spring.   Covered in a modest spring house with a bath sized container where the water bubbles up from the earth, the spring flows continuously, even through the longest dry spells.  It took me several years to realize the value of my own endless water supply.  Before I dug the ponds, the stream meandered harmlessly through the thicket before going underground.  Not until it was contained in three ponds, did its value manifest itself. 

A large 28-gallons-a-minute-pump in Beta distributes water as needed to the sprinklers in the Oval with the flick of a switch inside the house.  The size of the Oval alone would make watering by hand impractical.

I have come to realize over the years that the spring and the ponds are the most essential elements in the garden.  Nothing will thrive or live without a guaranteed supply of cool water so that after a 4-week midsummer drought, the High Falls garden looks fresh and the lawns moist and green. 

Is the water in the ponds clear?

Whenever there is a natural body of water of some volume there is a lot of life.  I stocked the pond with largemouth bass and triploid grass carp and the rest took care of itself.  In early summer there will be what appear to be millions of tadpoles, on their way to become frogs, tree frogs, peeper frogs and toads.  In the water there are crayfish, painted turtles, snakes, snails and zooplankton.    Above the water there are pond skaters, mosquitoes, dragonflies, geese, ducks,  heron and egret; and the last big snouted birds, together with the otters and maybe minks have reduced the number of fish in all the ponds quite a bit.

In deep-freeze winter when the areas around the pond are covered in snow, white-tailed deer come to drink the water that never freezes.  It never goes below 40F (4C).

When I walk the edges of the pond, I see all of this animal life. 

And then there is all the plant life.  The wild blue and yellow iris found their way to the pond's edges on their own.  I had nothing to do with it.  I did plant the Gunnera and some of the ferns.  Having their feet wet is just what they need and they will thrive still a hundred years from now......  The biggest plant life in the ponds are the algae.

Algae, like other plants are photosynthetic, meaning they grow explosively when the days get longer and warmer.  A wonderful warm April day will witness a sudden explosion.  I will get to the pond one morning and see a bright green pulsating blanket of gook covering large areas of the surface, sucking up all the oxygen and darkening the insides of the pond.

There are many remedies to battle the blanket and the one I like best is also the most magnificent one, having established itself over the years as the very recognizable symbol of the High Falls garden  The Fountain.

The Fountain is a floating fountain, shooting up a simple jet 20 feet straight into the air, like the one in Lake Geneva.  It is connected to a very well insulated electric wire on one side and a simple twine on the other.  Pulling the fountain by the twine into one spot of the pond where the algae are very dense is a very simple way to battle the blanket.  The mere gravity force of the water splashing down onto the algae will break up the very fabric the algae are made of.  I can move the fountain around and battle the algae with the water they live off.

So, is it clear? 

It is not clean or clear enough for drinking.  All the animals use the water as their living environment and we know how dirty that can get.

But, I do use Alpha as my swimming pond on those wonderful 90F (33C) midsummer days where even minimal physical exertion will raise my body temperature to such  a high level that the only thing I can think of is diving into eternally cool Alpha. 

The pond is 10 feet deep at the diving pond. 

Torrential Catskill thunder storms deposit successive cubic amounts of runoff silt into the pond.  After some years I have had to remove all the gook at the bottom to make sure the pond maintains a certain depth.  The excess silt was dumped in an area I now call the Alpha Garden, contained in a wall built with stones from the small quarries up the road.  The soil is not very fertile as I had expected but with enough manure it is making do.

The Alpha Garden is still very young and I delight in watching it taking on its own shape.  I am developing a dad's pride of it.

There are not many photographs of the Alpha Garden here.  It is not quite ready.

Chapter I : High Falls, the Garden

HIGH FALLS GARDEN

This book got its start on a warm spring day, when I was walking through the West Village in New York.  I was thirsty and went into a small shop on Bank Street to get some water.   I only had a $100 bill on me and the shop lady said she had no change for that.  I looked at her and could tell she expected me to put the bottle back but I said: "So now what? You really want me to put it back?"  She raised eye-brows, meaning yes.

And just then, a young guy behind me in cut offs and sleeveless shirt said: "I'll get that."  My first reaction was to refuse but I was really thirsty and I said: "Well that's really nice of you." He paid for my water, took his stuff and left.  After that I went to the West Side Piers and lay in the grass enjoying the spring sun.

It was crowded in the park, looked like everyone was having  a good time, enjoying each other and the midtown and downtown skylines.  And in the middle of all these people I saw the guy in the cut offs.   I still had the $100 bill in my pocket, went up to him and said: "Thank you again for your generosity.  Let me return the favor and buy you a coffee." And he said: "I was actually thinking about a beer. So you have a coffee, and me a beer."

We walked over to one of the waterfront cafes.... What should we talk about? I asked him if he had already seen the park gardens on the waterfront.  "No, are they any good?"  I said: Yes, very nicely done.   And I gave him a bit of the history of the old West Side Highway, the rotting piers and the seedy greasy side streets of the old West Village and how the new waterfront park had cleaned up the neighborhood and spurred new growth with handsome apartment buildings and nice shops.

So we sat and talked.  And we talked about parks and about plants and gardens and about architecture .  And that's what we have been doing ever since:  talking about gardens.

Appears my new friend is from France and his name is David, pronounced Daveed and he is in charge of some public gardens in a small town in Burgundy.  

The next week, I invited him to come and spend some time at my place upstate New York and have a look at my gardens of which I had been telling him so much...

Hanging out in my gardens, he asked me "Have you ever thought about writing a book about your garden and your house?"

"Of course, I would love to but I have no idea if I have it in me or really how to get started."

"But like this, your book will never be written."

"That's true, so why don't we start tonight? "

"You have a tape recorder?" "Of course.  I used to be a lawyer and dictating was second nature."

We poured some cocktails, finished off dinner, got the tape recorder and that's where the book begins.

This book is about having a garden, about working in a garden, about loving a garden.

This book is about being the man in the garden, about spending mornings and evenings bent over pulling weeds, transplanting the plants that need to be moved;  reflecting on what to tackle next, what other beauty to create. 

The garden is the territory you are in charge of.  And my garden is the one I'm the  Master of....... the one I happen to live in.   My garden, my territory where I determine what will happen, how things will look, what is going to live and what is not and what shape it will grow in.

A garden is nature.  A garden is the artificial part of nature.  A garden is the enclosed part of nature, keeping out wilderness and bringing in control.   The word garden derives from the Latin "hortus gardinus" which means "enclosed garden".  The Dutch word, 'tuin' is a small enclosed space, the English word, 'town' a somewhat larger enclosed space, and the German word "Zaun', the enclosure itself.   Early gardens were courtyards or outdoor gardens walled in stone, to protect them from outside elements.  And even these days we still put up deer fences to protect them from the outside.

When you enclose a space, control is easy.  When you are the one in control, the master of the land, you carry the responsibility to make the place as magnificent as you can according to your standards of aesthetics and beauty.  In other words, hard work.  And in return for those efforts, you will reap the height of satisfaction, pride, pleasure, contentedness and what I have come to experience as 'easy happiness'.

This book is about my garden and my house.  This book reflects the musings of a gardener.  Thoughts, worries and concerns mulled over while working in the garden. This is not a didactic piece.  This book is not about telling you what to do with your garden but rather me telling you what I do with mine.

Most of all, the book is about passion. Passion for things that grow. Passion for our distant cousins, plants and flowers. Passion about helping out, feeding, changing, watering, deciding and manipulating, about gardening. Passion about beauty and being happy.

This book is also about the person who is passionate about all those things. Someone who wanders the garden an hour before sunset and who cannot cease to be thrilled by manmade beauty.  Years ago, my 10 year old niece came up to me checking out to see what I was doing. She saw how hard I was working in the garden.  With a vengeance, as usual.  She flapped: "Ahh, you work in the garden all the time. Of course, that's because you don't have anything else to do."

I looked at her and thought: "That's a pretty smart thing to say." And then I thought she might be right. But she was right only in part. It was not because I had nothing else to do, it was because I chose not to do anything else. 

Every time I work in the garden, she's right there with me.

This book is not a didactic one. It does not aim to teach. It does, however, discuss strategy of investment of the money you spend. Investment of all the precious time you spend in your garden.

You may, for instance, want to spend as little time as possible on activities that do not produce visible returns.

What kind of return of investment do you aim for. Any return? Let me mention a few.

A high return on investment is a perennial you plant as a seed in the greenhouse or in situ in the garden where it is to bloom. The plant that emerges from the seed lasts a lifetime, a perennial that will be with you for the remainder of your life.

A high return on investment is straightening the edges of a path, enhancing the architectural lines in the garden. If it is a clean line, the path, it matters little what grows in the border. If a well tended environment matters to you, then straightening edges or raking a path will give you tremendous ROI.

You've earned a high return on investment if you enjoy the results of your work.

What is it you love?

Enjoyment, visual joy. Or sitting back and relaxing. Not having to do anything other than what you really want to do. Reading a book. Talking to a friend. Cook. Walk. Write. Whatever you want to do.

It may be the elation of walking through your garden and seeing what you have done, is good. You've worked a wonderful thing! That is a high return on investment.

Why do I Garden?

Well, the simplest answer to that is because I am outdoors all the time, because of all the things I can do during the day this is what i choose to do.  I can't think of anything I'd rather do.  And often, time in the garden comes at the expense of other things I need to do.    

[Except of course during the winter which I define as "access to garden denied".]  And when you're outside all the time, what better thing to do than get your hands dirty working the soil and beautify.  Really, the oldest profession in the world:  Work the land......

Sometimes, when I walk in my garden, I'll see an area that doesn't look so good any longer or more likely, has never looked good.  It's a wild overgrown area waiting to be tackled with creativity and a strong kind hand.   It is one of those areas that have become visibly unacceptable, a reason for embarrassment for me, a great threshold for a new project.....  I love to imagine what I can make it look like, I love to squint hard and see the imagined end result before I have even lifted a shovel.  That's why I garden, to create something that wasn't there before, to make a new area magnificent.

During the blooming season,  I'll walk into the garden with scissors or secateurs to cut some flowers.  As I walk along the paths I'll imagine what blooms will look best in the vase I am planning and carefully pick them.  For me nothing matches the elation and happiness I experience when I walk back to the house, arms loaded with flowers.  I am rich.  I bring the harvest in.  That's why I garden.

Watch me pull my garden cart filled with 30 shovels of mulch and dirt.  Listen to my heart pound at 120 beats a minute.  Watch my chest heave and fill with clean air.  Look at me squatted down in the middle of a flower bed, get up and squat down again to pull out weeds.  A very serious abs and buttocks workout.   Three times a year the barberry hedges that circle the Oval Garden need trimming.  In the earlier days they reached to my shoulders.  Holding the electric clipper above my shoulders for 2-3 hours proved to be unpleasant and impossible, so I have now lowered the hedges to chest level.   I do work out at my gym regularly but there is nothing as exhilarating as pure exhausting physical labor that serves a purpose other than phys ed.  That's why  I garden?

And the best thing about gardening is that it never ends.  I remember the first day in the garden many years ago right after I bought the house, when I bought a shovel and stuck it in the ground where it hit a multitude of rocks hiding right under the surface.  Upstate New York is built on solid rock about 4 - 5 feet deep, much of which dates back to the Devonian Period (app. 350-400 million years ago).  The soil on top of it is richly sprinkled with loose stones of all dimensions that can be handled only with the muscular bluster of a pick axe.   It was obvious the shovel wasn't going to do.  I got myself a pick axe and I still use it as my most trusted tool. 

I have worked many hours over the seasons and years and am proud of the things I achieved and delighted with the happiness it brought me.  When I look back at older photographs of the garden I smile at the simplicity of the early garden just as I will smirk at the pictures i take today, many years from now.   For the work in the garden will never be finished.

What kind of garden is yours?.

I have never classified my garden.  My High Falls garden doesn't fit any of the garden definitions. It is not a French Formal Garden, although there are some borders that are handsomely defined by trimmed boxwood.  It is not an English Landscape Garden, with winding paths, ponds and temples, bridges and groupings of dignified trees, endless orchard alleys and tall background perennials with smaller ones closer to the path, making it all look rather like a Cottage Garden. 

It is not a Vegetable Garden, although there is a small kitchen yard near the house that hosts lovage, parsley, sweet basilicum, oregano, rosemary, mint, arugula and shallots that come in so handy to give a pinch of herbal taste to dinner.

Not a Fernery, although over the years I have brought in many different kinds of ferns from the woods or catalogs.    They have all thrived and some have morphed into enormous invasive clusters.

It is a Flower garden, an Herb Garden, a Rose Garden, a Shade Garden, a White Garden, a Wildflower Garden and when it is cold, it is a Winter Garden.  But most of all it is a Pleasure Garden, a Garden of Delight, where fragrance, color, shape, architectural lines and structures, topiaries, spewing fountains, mini waterfalls, wisteria structures and bird song, stimulate all of our senses.  And of course, in this garden the birds are happy too.....  

.

When you started out in High Falls, you say there was no garden at all.  So how did you begin?  What were your thoughts and ideas?

In the beginning there was no great design scheme that was the basis for the garden.  I started in a corner somewhat near the house.  After many years of doing basic work, buying delphiniums and other first-time-gardener-plants and discovering the excitement of basic gardening, I began to understand the importance of the lay of the land, the position of the sun on a summer afternoon or the long lines on the grass an hour before sunset, and all the other essential elements that define the locus of the garden, where it nestles in its micro-climates, the windy nooks and the places by the water in the ponds that never freeze and where I dare to plant lower-zoned plants.
  

All these fundamentals which a good and professional landscaper would have taken one afternoon to comprehend, took me five years, i think to grasp.

Have you always loved working in your garden?

When I  was a kid, growing up in a small town in the South of Holland, I remember I was expected to be helping my parents in the garden.  Or, maybe it was me who always volunteered, or who best responded to a "go help your dad" nudge.  I don't recall any of my brothers or sisters spending much time in the garden helping them out.   It was always me who was digging in the garden.

This is 1968.  My dad and I working in the garden.  My father is fully dressed in a suit, including tie.  I have never seen him otherwise....

Growing up in Holland, it's natural that you know the basics of gardening, of setting up borders, of planting, of bulbs, of doing drudge maintenance work, of developing a sense of aesthetics and of developing ideas of what is beautiful.  Everyone has a garden there and everyone takes enormous pride in making it as lovely as they can.   

When I moved to New York, the 22nd floor of an apartment building in Greenwich Village was my home.  I quickly realized that if I was going to get my hands dirty, do some digging and connect with the earth I'd have to get either a very expensive terrace apartment in Manhattan or find a place somewhere out of the city.

So when I got my place upstate with 5 acres of "undeveloped yard",  I had found my pristine canvas and have worked and labored very hard in it for almost 30 years.

Who helps you with all the work in the garden?  Or do you do all the work yourself?

When people visit me in the garden for the first time they invariably ask "who does all this work around here?"   [When people ask a question like that they most often have already reviewed the possible answers and have settled on a credible response. ]

When I tell them I do all the work here, most seem incredulous because of the sheer size of the garden, the acres of lawn that need to be cut in what must be several hours on a tractor and the thousands of weeds that require attention on  a somewhat regular basis.

I realize the size of the garden would frighten any person.  I do admit that some days in May when everything pushes out of the ground, I do stumble back to the house mumbling this has gotten to be too much and I can no longer do this.  But then I had that same feeling 20 years ago or so when the garden was much smaller.

I have learned to take small steps at a time.  While I am fortunate that my time in the garden is not limited to just Saturdays, I have learned to pace my garden labor across large swaths of time.  The lawns are big, but I don't cut all of the grass in  one sitting.  The lawns closest to the house get the most attention, the ones far away, a bit less.   But I will see to it at all times the overall impression of the garden will be a handsome one.

 

Three or four tractor runs a week, filling in small parts of a lazy afternoon of 30 - 45 minutes each, make controlling the expanse of green seem like child's' work.  

And weeding on a somewhat regular basis?   That is not a criterion I apply.   When I walk though the garden my eye will always be aware of the overall impression any corner gives.  If one area has too many weeds to still be aesthetically welcome here, I will zoom in on that corner with and make sure that at the end of an hour it will be weed free and ready for a close-up.  But it is a last ditch effort.  Only if it had become completely unacceptable for visual pleasure will i focus on cleaning it up. 

Which brings me to weeds. 

I was working out at my gym the other day and a lean man next to me was doing hundreds of sit ups on an incline bench.  When he was finished I asked him how many he was doing.    'Hundreds' he replied 'but I have to develop a strong lower back because I am bent over most of the summer'.  With that, he had immediately identified himself as a gardener because no one else will spend the summer bent over unless you are the master of your land and you need to get rid of all things that do not belong there:  weeds, the elephant in the room of gardening, because dealing with them will take up most of your time in the garden.  

It's an unattractive subject but I must give it attention because it is so big.  I spend much time, really most of my time in the garden (trying to) eradicate weeds.

Whether you work with pre-emergent weed control or outright weed killer, the only way your garden will truly be weed free is through your time spent on it.  Not all bad really.  I have learned to enjoy it, working my land and shaping it to my vision.  It gives me much time to think about anything that enters my brain.

If your garden has any size it will never be fully weed free, unless you have a staff of helpers.

ARE ALL WEEDS EQUAL?    

 Let's talk about the sly and the bad.   The slyest of them all is the weed whose foliage or hue mimics that of the plant it stands next to.   It thinks it will be invisible to me and escape my pull.  At times I will look down on it in complete fascination at how similarly it presents itself to the world.  Almost identical coloring and leaf shape, yet only subtle differences that distinguish the prince from the poor relative.  Years of experience have taught me to discern and I smirk when I see the futile attempt at deceiving me.

The worst of the weeds is the one with the strongest root system.  The root snaps off when you pull it or it has knitted a dense matted root system, as has the clover.  So what to do?

Water is the biggest enemy of roots.  Soak the soil around the weed roots till the soils turn to mud and then gently pull it out, by hand by gently jiggling it by its base or with a pitchfork if it is particularly rebellious.  Resistance to mud is futile.

  

A silent pull? 

When you pull the weed out and you hear something snap, you know that part of the root is still intact underground.  A root by itself will not grow a new plant because it requires an outlet into the light.  Depending on how deep the root system broke off underground, it will not have the capacity to start a new plant. 

Water is the biggest enemy of roots.  Soak the soil around the weed roots till the soils turn to mud and then gently pull it out by hand gently jiggling it by its base or with a pitchfork if it is particularly rebellious.  Resistance to mud is futile.  No snap.

So now that you have piles of weeds lying around, I like to use them as local compost, ball them up and toss them under the foliage  of established  perennials.
  

Do you like to weed?

Gardening  and weeding are pretty much the same thing.   Weeding is working on the aesthetics of the garden, making sure you create beauty and maximize your easy happiness because a garden full of weeds is not a garden of visual delight. 

A weedy garden is like a cluttered house.  How much nicer is the house after you have straightened it up and cleaned all the surfaces.   A clutter free garden is the standard I have set.  If I walk around the garden paths with friends, a drink and Duke in tow, i want laughter and calm good looks.

Would I be happier if there weren't any weeds?

I have come to respect unavoidability of weeds.  They show such enthusiasm & power.  It is only I, the boss around here who has determined they have no place here. 

If there were no weeds, much of the challenge of gardening as I have come to know it, would be gone. A weedless environment would be like having a garden on Astroturf.

Stone is the glue of High Falls. 

It is our most natural and abundant building block.  Between 3 to 5 feet beneath the soil, we live on solid bedrock broken up by occasional subterranean streams.   Our land is surrounded by small quarries and shale groves. 

Every wallop with my pick axe produces a small number of flat stones that pop up from the soil.   I use them to build the 'wallettes' that separate the borders from the lawn and paths. 

Stone is everywhere.

I love using big rectangle boulders for big projects.  The treacherous slope on the south side of the house needed some work to prevent more twisted ankles.

A young guy about a mile from the house had solid stones lying in his yard we decided to use.  After he and his friends dropped them off at the top of the slope I set out to install them myself.  Or so I thought. 

The picture above here shows the result of a day's work:   me and my muscle power, tactical intelligence,  metal levers, some wooden slides,  heavy breathing and gravity.   All I managed was to  install the bottom step.

The next day, the three guys were back and finished the job.   Now anyone in even 6-inch high heels  has no problem  ascending the steps.

 Click here for the link to the GARDEN CONSERVANCY OPEN DAYS ON SEPTEMBER 17, 2011