Due to a job change, my husband and I have been uprooted from our home in North Texas and plunked down in North Alabama. Not the biggest or most dramatic location change one can undergo, I admit. It’s not even the biggest or most dramatic location change my husband or I have had in our respective pasts. But for me, on the long list of losses involved in any move–friends, familiar places, community– there was also the loss of my garden.
In 2018, I finally bought my first home. After years of renting and being limited to patio container gardening, I went home shopping with a focus on finding a yard I could turn into a garden oasis to escape into at the end of my day. My poor realtor was a little confused by a single, young-ish professional woman who had less than zero interest in counter-tops, bathroom amenities or square footage of the actual house. I spent more time walking around yards than up and down hallways. In the end, I bought a 1950s ranch that had only been partially remodeled. But the house came with a fairly large yard for my urban area–a full third of an acre–and without a bossy HOA to dictate crappy uniform landscape rules. It was a bland rectangle of Bermuda grass (Cynodon dactylon) bordered with unkempt red-tip photinias (Photinia x fraseri) and a set of trees that included a wonderful live oak (Quercus virginiana), a great loblolly pine (Pinus taeda), some really large crepe myrtles (Lagerstroemia indicia) and several truly awful fruitless mulberry (Morus alba) trees. It was a yard I had big dreams of transforming from predominantly turfgrass lawn into so many flower and garden beds that I would eventually be able to “mow” the lawn with a pair of safety scissors.
I still recall the rush of driving a shovel into my backyard to start turning over my first garden bed. After years of digging up the yard being verboten by landlords, I felt a little like a rule-breaker as I tore up that first 5 ft by 5ft square, fighting against the nightmare that is Bermuda grass. The last time I was able to dig in a yard, I was a kid back in Central Texas where our ground was thick black clay cast down for misleading 5 to 6 inches before throwing up a barrier of several feet of limestone. Much of North Texas is very similar, and I was prepared for that. Instead I had the pleasant experience of a finding a very nice, thick layer of sandy loam. I knew I had bought the right house!
That 5 by 5 square was just the start. I added another. And another. And another. Ultimately covering an area of 25 feet by 35 feet of vegetable garden that I kept going more or less year round in Zone 8b. I added a hedge of blackberries that managed to yield enough fruit to make preserves less than a year after I got them in the ground, a fig tree which had only just started to fruit when we left, and a pomegranate tree that was likely to fruit in another year. I trimmed away at those stupid red-tipped photinias (I found an entire clothesline hidden by those overgrown things). I added broad flower beds with sweeping curves along the front where the last owners had ripped out all the shrubs, destroying the curb appeal and leaving the slab foundation exposed. I hauled at least 60 times my own weight in cedar mulch. I spent hours on the Native Plant Society of North Texas website researching drought-tolerate natives to add to my landscape and then even more hours trying to source those plants I wound up with native grasses like Lindheimer’s Muhly (Muhlenbergia lindheimeri), flowering shrubs like Texas sage (Leucophyllum frutescens) and my personal favorite, Turk’s Cap (Malvaviscus arboreus) which thrives in sun and shade through the hot part of the summer, is a huge hit with hummingbirds and which eventually wound up in my wedding bouquet.
It was always a work in progress–that’s half the fun of gardening–but I had a lot of plans and a firm direction for that yard. I was looking forward to adding trellising, finally finding and planting a Mexican Plum tree (Prunus Mexicana), expanding the beds around the house, establishing a wildflower meadow area, building an area for entertaining, and harvesting fruit from the trees I had planted. That vision was a positive goal to work toward. A goal which was essential to pulling me out of an incredibly dark time in my life, and keeping me from sinking again when my job grew more and more toxic and the whole world started to go absolutely insane. Escaping to work in that garden was essential to me, and that made for an emotional connection far beyond just lawn chores.
Letting go of those plans and all the work that had already gone into them has been and continues to be more difficult than I had imagined when I accepted my new job…
But gardens don’t really…move.
So, here I am. A Gardener with no garden I can escape into–until I build it. The plans I had started in those old spaces are unfinished, and the beds and soil I put so much into are out of my control and hundreds of miles from here. So much work already is gone. I don’t even have the same USDA Plant Hardiness Zone I’ve been so used to working with.
There’s more space. Way more rainfall. Zero trees. No garden beds. No red tipped photinias…. But still sea of stinkin’ Bermuda grass.
