Jaci Dawn

We had a lovely break in the weather here that opened the door for me to spend a few (as in 5.5) hours working on getting the flower beds ready for the change of season. Yes, I hurt – the arthritis in my hands is screaming loudly tonight. I’ll find some new muscles tomorrow when they start to ache.

I can remember a time when working in the yard was seen as a punishment for misdeeds, most of which I cannot recall. Whatever the misdeeds were, they usually entailed all three of us getting a two-week sentence to hard labor in the summer sun while our neighbors and friends got to play. We became handy with a hoe and a spade, and we learned to identify a “weed” from a preferred plant (although I never did agree with my father on the status of hollyhocks – those are flowers, but he considered them weeds). We learned to hate crab grass and salt grass.

You would think, after all those hours – and they seemed infinitesimal when the punishment cut into our summer vacation, that we would have grown up hating gardening. I can’t speak for my brother and my sister is long gone (but I can safely assume gardening never was her thing), but I grew to love the smell of loam and the satisfaction of seeing a neat garden bed emerge from the tangle of weeds.

I planted my first flower bed from scratch around the door step of a little rental I lived in when I was 22. I believe I planted annuals purchased from the grocery store parking lot. My next attempt was weeding out the Bishop’s Weed that grew along the walkway of another rental, this one I shared with a girlfriend or two. But I didn’t actually begin gardening until the second year I was married, when my husband and I moved back into that little rental with the Bishop’s Weed along the walkway. It had honeysuckle and peonies out front as well. That was when I fell in love with peonies.

Don and I tilled up a sunny spot in the back yard and bought our first seeds from a catalog. I remember which catalog: Nichols Herb Garden. We still buy our seeds from them, but nowadays we drive up the Willamette River Valley to their location in Albany rather than ordering via catalog.

Don built a cold frame along one side of the house and we harvested potatoes, tomatoes, corn, beans, lettuce.

We moved from Baker City in the high desert country to the northern end of the Willamette Valley in 1983. Our first home here was a rental with an acre of land, hidden behind a huge bay laurel hedge and shaded by tall fir trees. The yard was an undiscovered gem of roses, lilies, peonies, rhododendrons, azaleas, and more. We were pleasantly surprised with the advent of the Dragon lily that summer – a magnificent, if not stinky, arum. I spent hours hand picking slugs off of plants and drowning them in a vain attempt to get ahead of the voracious pests. Too much shade, too much debris to shelter in.

We stole the Dragon lily from the yard when we moved. We figured no one would appreciate it like we did, and no one knew it was there, and no one would miss it.

Our first home had a lovely yard that sloped down to a giant Douglas Fir and a big yucca that bloomed every summer. Vinca minor (aka periwinkle) covered the side hill until I began to pull it back and discovered a plethora of crowded out plants underneath it. Candy tuft, azalea, roses. I planted delphiniums and gladiolas. I began to love my time in the garden, rearranging, replanting, and building up. We experimented with raised beds for the vegetable garden.

It was not until we lost everything and had to start over, however, that I really fell in love with gardening. We purchased an old single wide trailer that we set up in a rural park that a friend owned. 14×70′ of living space, complete with the hitch left on (a joke – we fully expected to leave the trailer behind within five years, and so we insisted the hitch stay on). The yard was about the same dimensions, shaded by fir and planted pine trees. I guess, technically, our yard was the back yard, but we came to a quick agreement with our first neighbors who had children the same age as ours: they could have the back yard for their kids (and ours) to play in. I took over the front yard (which was the back yard to a series of different residents, none of whom ever cared what the set up was).

That was the second yard I designed. But this time, I had a blank pallet and the design was entirely my own making. I cut out a small place for a lawn – fish shaped, although that was not on purpose. I had a clothes line across the back, and then there was the dog’s part of the yard where I also planted my first black cap raspberry.

I had a black cap when I was 16. It grew in the strangest place in the yard – in total shade, along a strip of lawn just 3′ wide, between our house and the chain link fence separating us from our neighbor. I harvested the berries all summer, eating them as they ripened. One summer, when my parents were gone, the neighbor cut it down. I freaked. My mom called him and he promised he’d never cut it down again. (Thinking about it, I planted my first Shasta Daisies at that house – a gift from the elderly Jehovah’s Witness across the street that I used to visit. She had a wooden leg. She wrote me letters until her death in the early 1980’s.)

The trailer park afforded me just enough room to have a few roses and plant a small double set of raised beds for a vegetable garden. The roses – and the Dragon lily, which we were still carrying with us – were the only flowers we purchased. I decided to plant only native plants in that yard, and I harvested them off of the adjacent 80 acres where my horse was boarded: flowering currant, wild irises, giant lupins, sword ferns, native columbine, foxglove. My husband planted our first espalier apple tree.

That garden taught me how to control slugs and how to make huge mistakes. One year, I planted fireweed. The next year, I pulled it all out. I eliminated hiding places for slugs and they wandered elsewhere. I forced my blackcap to grow one direction one year and then turned it the next year so I could easily cut out the dead canes.

We lived there longer than five years – the joke being on us. Two years, we tried a communal garden with the rest of the residents (seven trailers, seven families). It was a disaster. We grew dahlias and I weeded religiously. The others didn’t weed so much. One neighbor watered his portion overnight, draining the communal well.

In 2002, we found this house and bought it. The yard had a lot to do with why we bought it: it was overgrown with grass, blackberries, nightshade, and untended rhododendrons. There were faded peonies buried in the grass. We brought our Dragon lily and my husband dug up a Hawthorne out of the pasture. I brought my mother’s irises.

We planted Oregon grape along the fence, only to discover it is a variety that grows six feet tall. I hope to dig that out next summer.

I’m not a green thumb. I just like getting my hands into the loam, smelling the rot of plant matter, and trying to see what grows – and where. I’ve moved my new black cap raspberry three times (it finally took off this summer). I just separated my irises and pulled up as many of the grape hyacinths as I could find – they will go out on the street with a FREE sign. I have a huge yucca that blooms every year, purloined from someone else’s FREE pile. I planted a grape that took over my yard this summer – the crazy thing grew twenty-five feet! I’ve lost three rosemary bushes and have yet to coax a flowering currant to like this yard.

I don’t touch the vegetable garden except to harvest things – that belongs to Donald. Our espalier apple trees do poorly here. We have a hazelnut that has grown by leaps and bounds (and for which the jays and squirrels thank us).

Today, I dug out all the wild violets. They never bloom. They crowd out several peonies. I think I will put some of my irises in that corner – the irises I keep. My mother’s irises. We have so many Dragon lilies now, all descended from the one we stole from a rental in 1984.

I don’t know a lot about gardening – I just jump in and make mistakes, then tear them out again.