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Lehigh valley living

Brotherly Love Historic Trail

-- dictionary.com

I was an old house buff who grew into gardening because I had to.  The 1816 Pennsylvania farmhouse (background, top left photo) we bought in 1989 came with three quarters of an acre.  I was stuck.  The difference was, I knew what the house needed -- paint, a new roof and removal of the cheap-o aluminum siding -- but had no clue what to do with the yard.

The previous owners, who had lived here since 1942, had once had a vegetable garden.  But that was many years ago.  Other than two red oaks, the most significant plantings were a dead elm and a row of fading hemlocks.  That first summer, I took an axe to the elm (above).

Then, not much happened for several years.  Most of our attention went to a house with lots of deferred maintenance.  By the early 1990s, however, we had a toddler and no fence to keep her out of the street.  So, I built a fence.

Then we began planting along the fence.  We started by transplanting the previous owners' woody old azaleas to new positions.  Then, we began adding plants of our own choosing: hydrangea, viburnum, an amur maple and lots of hostas.

In 1994, we took a load of free fill from a swimming pool contractor and used it to begin terracing the backyard which sloped off toward a nearby creek.  In 1995, I built an arbor on that terrace that has become the focus of our garden.

The top of the arbor is now crowned with a dense mat of variegated porcelain-berry ampelopsis.  I had intended that it would share the space with climbing roses, but...well, let's just say that ampelopsis has no sharing characteristics.  I moved the roses.

In 2001, we planted our first fruit trees -- apples (Pink Lady, Smokehouse and Fulford Gala and cherry (Montmorency) -- and our first vegetable garden.  More recently, we've begun to consider the large (and very attractive) blue spruce which, sadly, throws a bit too much shade into the vegetable garden.  As a result, our tomatoes don't redden until September and our 2004 apple crop totaled...two.  (Keep it?  Cut it?  Hmmm.....)  Gardening veterans tell us that gardens are like children -- never finished, always works in progress.  In fact, they often survive their gardeners and, even then, are still not finished.  I believe this.

"Thoreau never mentioned the icky little bugs."

                                                            --Anonymous

Mark E. Dixon