Piedmont Gardener

Wonder Spouse and I celebrated 35 years of marriage this week. As you can see in the photo taken by my brother that day, we have never been fancy folks. I wore a dress I considered to be too nice for work, and he didn’t even put on a tie. It was the marriage that mattered to us, not the outer trappings.

The ceremony was on the front lawn of the first house we bought together — a little starter home in a new neighborhood. The attraction was the lot size — almost an acre. As is typical of new home construction here, all topsoil was removed. Red clay subsoil was compressed into near impermeability. But that did not deter our young selves as we eagerly began transforming the yard. 

We both always grew vegetable gardens, so Wonder Spouse set to work digging out the clay in the area we set aside for food-growing. I don’t know how many different kinds and quantities of soil amendments we added, but it was enough for me to be able to grow food by the next year. We only stayed in this house until early 1989. Here is what the vegetable garden looked like in 1988.

 

We both wanted more land. In 1989, we found a house, then out in the country, on five acres. The house was fine — it wasn’t our focus. Even in January when we first set eyes on it, the land looked like heaven to me. I knew enough about the ecology of my region to see that the property possessed a diverse area of microenvironments just waiting to be exploited. I recognized the active floodplain and mature ash forest growing on it. The creek that bordered one side of the property was another big draw for us, and the soil — which I sampled on our first visit — was sandy loam. All I had to do to sell Wonder Spouse on this site was utter one sentence: “On this land, we can grow potatoes.” And so we have.

The previous owner of the property maintained it as if it were a public park. He eradicated all understory trees except a few mature native dogwoods but retained the magnificent canopy trees, including enormous river birches, tulip poplars, sweet gums, red maples, red cedars, several oak species, and loblolly pines. Beneath the trees grew only grass. His use of herbicides must have been extensive, judging by how quickly native plants returned after we moved in on April 1, 1989. Yes, we were fools in love with this property. Here’s what the floodplain looked like from the back deck during one of our winter visits before we moved in.

And here is a similar view taken in December of 2018. Frequent floods have cut channels across what was a nearly always dry floodplain in the early years.

By the summer of 1990, we were hard at work creating a vegetable garden, and I was adding as many native understory trees and shrubs as our budget could afford. My mother-in-law visited that summer and took this photo of us.

In those early years, we only needed a single-wire electric fence powered by a solar battery to protect the garden. As suburbs overran our once-rural area, displacing wildlife, we surrounded the vegetable garden with a sturdy deer fence.

The front of the house was obscured by a hodgepodge of mostly non-native trees and shrubs when we first moved in.

I don’t have an exact shot of this perspective that is more recent, but this one of the front pollinator garden is close. In the intervening years, Wonder Spouse changed the driveway, and we removed all the vegetation you see up front except for the magnolia on the far left, and had a Wonder Spouse-designed system of decks and walkways erected at the front entrance. A few years ago, we installed a pollinator garden that continues to flourish.

There are probably a few keys to the success of our partnership. We were always two like-minded souls, who were fast friends long before our relationship deepened. But it is our Green World collaboration, I suspect, that keeps us flourishing, as we continue to grow and laugh together.

Happy Anniversary, Wonder Spouse.