Historical Summer 2018 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
We live on a corner plot in Kingsbury Square, and neighbors came past all the time, and are often kind enough to say how they like what we are doing to our yard.
As we come up to the annual Skinker DeBaliviere Garden tour, I started to wonder, what is the theme of our yard?
We are blessed with 3 fully established and magnificently different trees on our property, plus street and neighbors trees, so we have a lot of shade garden.
In fact, I have had a battle over the last 5 years to grow a lawn along the north facing part of the yard, which is overshadowed by a Southern Magnolia.
I can get grass to germinate in the spring, but by summer it’s just too shady for it to prosper. So this year I have admitted defeat, and turned the most shaded area into a hosta patch, with a variety of different types of leaves. Bulbs lighten the west of the property in the spring, but once summer comes and the trees shade this area, it is hard to find a place where “full sun” plants will get the amount of light they need. Irises do well there, as do many ground cover plants, but as an area, it often fails to “pop” with the color we’d like.
The yard area at the south of our house should be the sunniest, but it is shaded by our Locust tree and our neighbor’s Bradford Pear.
This makes our deck wonderfully shaded for sitting out in mid-summer, but does mean that even here we struggle with plants that need full sun.
We like to grow a few vegetables and have taken to planting herbs, tomatoes, lettuces, radishes and green onions in planters on our deck, as the place that will get the most of the sun. Our yard has evolved over the years we have lived here.
I suspect it always will continue to change for as long as we are here, and, actually, I like that.
If everything was settled, nothing needed to be moved, there were no sudden surprises and nothing to work on, it might be “perfect,” but it would stop being interesting.
Then it occurred to me: people didn’t say they liked what we “had done” to our yard, rather they said they liked what we “were doing.” I think the appropriate theme for our yard is that it’s a work in progress, and always will be.
Original photograph caption
Garden fountain accompanying Derek Knight’s gardening column.
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, Summer 2018.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times2018_06.pdf, printed page(s) 4; PDF page(s) 4.
