Learning to Garden (My Summer Project) Part 1

My father's passion has always been gardening.  I've enjoyed the fruits of his labour, though only really appreciated it more recently, appreciated it for what it is: the time it took to make and grow his garden, the simplicity of it, the perfection.  I appreciate it more now and I've taken an interest.  I want to learn how to make something like this and see how it was done, to try to see if I could do it, if I could make something like this and watch it grow.  

Some of the trees in this garden are more than ten years old and taller than the house.  I remember when they were planted.  Some of them I helped plant or gave as gifts. 

A garden like this requires a lot of upkeep, and this has been a hectic year for my parents.  I wanted to help out.  I walked in the garden and noticed the paths needed to be raked, so that's what I decided to help out with.

The paths, first of all, let me explain.  The paths were designed and made by my father, my father and me, one summer maybe ten years ago.  My father designed everything and cut all the sod, because cutting sod is hard work and requires a lot of strength.  I laid the sod though.  My dad cut it, and I laid all the sod in that part of the garden, and my mom brought the sod from the truck in a wheelbarrow to where we were working.  The sod part took us about two days.
 
Before that, though, my dad had designed the garden.  This was to be like an English walking garden with paths in the shape of great circles interlinked with lines and each other, sectioning off brick-lined flowerbeds and swaths of lush grass. 

He designed it all with a stick and a piece of string and didn't even plan it out first on paper as far as I know.  He just went out into the back behind the catonia aster hedge where nothing was but dirt, and plotted out the size of the garden.  Then he tied the string to the stick and put it in the dirt, and walked until the string pulled taut.  He walked in a circle and that was the edge of a flowerbed or a path, or the far side of a path with a little more string.

He planned it all out and then paved the edges of the paths with bricks laid in, one at a time, each brick hand-sanded and cleaned (by him), taken from the ruins of the old brick warehouse his father used to own, back when the business was new.  Beautiful old red clay bricks, lovingly restored.

Then we spent two days filling all the grass parts with sod.  It was no easy thing, I tell you, but undeniably worth it.  Dad cut it, I laid it, mom hauled it.  She's a great hauler, a tromper; my mother is of pioneer stock.  My father too of course.  And me.  If somewhat belatedly.

The grass in that garden is always thick and often wet; it holds the dew and the rain and the stardust at midnight.  Walking through it is like a cool massage and a drink for the bottoms of your feet, sluicing away dust and leaving them feeling clean and rejuvenated.

I could talk for hours about the flower beds.  And there are trees of all kinds, a cedar, a cherry tree, one side bordered by saskatoonberry bushes grown eight feet tall now, the other by the thick carraganas that were there from the beginning.  And the elms behind those.  Rosebushes.  It's a beautifuly made garden.

The paths, though.  The paths used to be dug down and full of soft, crumbly sand that's firm underfoot but crinkles up between your toes.  Paths like being at the beach.  

To keep the sand soft like that we need to rake it, and rake it a lot, especially after a hard rain.  Because the sand also has clay in it, and the clay gets hard baked after heavy rain in the sun.  The hot, dry, July in Saskatchewan sun.

It's been raining a lot this summer and my parents have been very busy, with the Centennial and so many people here and with them travelling so much -- the paths looked to me like they needed work.

So I started raking.


(To Be Continued)