Beginnings

Welcome to Gardens Eye View. This is a blog of my ramblings as I discover the life and soul of the garden.  I hope to post weekly about my quest as I garden and have gardened through the years.  I remember always loving digging in the dirt from my earliest memories between 2 and 5 years old.  I loved it so much so that my nickname as a child was “digger”.  I was always carrying a stick and digging holes in the small patch of grass and dirt behind our row house in Philadelphia.

When we moved to Northern Indiana in the early 60s, I remember my mother planting cherry tomatoes, mint and strawberries in our small yard.  A huge sweet scented honeysuckle vine greeted me every time I left the house by the lower basement door.  Mom was always tending her roses and planting a swath of colorful annuals.  I would watch, pick and weed. I was hooked but never really knew it.   The lure of the dirt-the feel and smell of it.  The smell and colors of the flowers.  Whatever it was I looked forward to spring, then summer and then the colors of fall.

Central NY was our next stop in the late 60s.  Here my parents began again as they planted a medium sized veggie garden that seemed to grow larger every year.  I was in my teens so I would watch, pick, eat but not really feel the lure of the garden.  It took until the late 80s when I was living in an apartment with a balcony, that I tried my luck at container gardening.  I found I loved to watch gardening shows too.  But it wasn’t until 1995 that I started to have a go at gardening around my house where I lived with my husband to be.  It took me 30 years to get back to the beginning.  Back to the lure of the dirt-the smell, the feel.  I was in my late 30s, but it was a good time to begin again.  To strike out and plant perennial gardens under the 100 foot walnut trees surrounding us.  A challenge I was up for, but that’s a story in and of itself.

Well now we live in a house we built 5 years ago.  A blank slate, a creation waiting to happen.  Another new beginning.  A garden or should I say gardens that begin anew each year.  Never quite the same as the year before.  Never quite done.  But maybe that is the lure of the garden.  The never ending beginning every year as the brown earth springs forth with new growth.  I marvel at that beginning.    How this barren brown garden is suddenly green and growing until you can hardly see the brown earth anymore.  What beauty will it bring, what challenges, what changes.

The garden seems the perfect metaphor for my life.  I guess that is why I chose to write this blog.  As I have grown in years I realize my life is constantly starting anew whether I like it or not.  I am always re-creating myself, not quite done; always changing; every year different.  I used to resist this change, but like the garden I am learning to accept the changes that will come and learn from them.  So I plan to write about those changes, my life and my garden-how I see them.  I hope you enjoy the journey as much as I do.