Garden Reports and Rejoicing – October 9
Five years ago we were into our third year of looking for a larger property and new house. On Columbus Day weekend I saw a classified ad in the Cape Cod Times for an open house in Sandwich. “I don’t know if it will be anything good,” I remember saying to my husband, “but it’s over two acres on a lake.”
This was our first visit to Poison Ivy Acres, and although it wasn’t love at first sight, it was right enough to prompt a return visit. I remember that the seller had put in several pots of mums in strategic locations, adding seasonal color by the top of the driveway, front door, and path to the lake.
It wasn’t these mums that sold the house, especially for this hortaholic. I was more intrigued by the lack of landscaping since this was, for this gardener, an appealing blank slate.
Now, on that fifth anniversary of that first visit, I’m pleased that at least one of those mums is still in place. Although most of the beds where the original owners placed open-house-mums have been totally changed, the only additions we’ve made around the mailbox was the planting of Nippon daisies to the side of the original rust-colored chrysanthemums.
I’m thinking that there are probably areas of your yard and gardens that may not be the best planned or designed, but are places that recall the past or otherwise speak to your heart. It’s important, I think, to see and preserve those places that call to us. They may be odd, hodgepodge, or otherwise quirky, but these locations and the plants that thrive there say, “Welcome home.”
Welcome home.
A simple, perhaps unexciting, area around the mailbox. Nevertheless, it calls to me. Welcome home.
