About

About the Yard

I began designing and building this yard when I moved here in late December of 2006. I have done all of the plant work and most of the labor except for getting help spreading mulch in 2007 while recovering from knee surgery and having way too much ground to cover for my circumstances. The really good looking stuff in the yard was installed by Harvey Chandler of First Impressions in Duluth, Georgia. I designed the layout and Harvey made great decisions in how to install the plan in our red clay. He did the drycreeks, backyard walkways, pergola, driveway extension, stone steps, patios, paths, and other professional stonework. Later, in 2012, additional stone walkways and a patio were installed by Bud Newton of Sacred Gardens landscaping; and in 2019, one final walkway and the stairs to The Temple were built by Unique Paver Installations.

I have no formal training in landscaping, botany, horticulture, or anything else related to gardening. I didn't begin to garden seriously until I was in my late 40s and began to grow (and kill) plants in my yard following my move to Athens, GA in 1998. My knowledge has come through talking with fellow gardeners and a few professional plantspeople and landscapers, from reading a lot of books and magazines, and from experimenting in the yard. I also developed an interest in water drainage, and the yard includes a number of means of reducing, channeling, and harvesting runoff and dispersing it evenly around the grounds. The primary means of water conservation is terracing; there's also a lot of gravel in pits I've done to drop runoff deep into the ground.

I spend about an hour a day working in the yard, and often an hour in the evening taking it in and thinking about how to improve it. The yard therefore provides me with exercise, spiritual fulfillment, an ongoing and never-ending project, outdoor enlightenment, a feeling of harmony with my environment, a beautiful setting for my home, and something to write about here at this website. Aside from work and my personal relationships, it's where I find meaning.

My yard is designed as both an ornamental landscape for human enjoyment and a habitat for wildlife. To this point I've not succeeded in growing food, aside from blueberries, and have abandoned the effort.

To the greatest extent possible, I follow principles of organic gardening. I don't fertilize; the only insecticides I use are for the occasional attention to hornets or wasps when they become aggressive toward the human residents; and as a concession to age and the size (1.25 acres) of the lot, I use a herbicide to eradicate weeds when I can't keep up with them. I rely on integrated pest management (especially planting to attract beneficial bugs), mulching, water conservation, xeriscaping, lawnless landscaping, and related methods to maintain balance and keep the yard thriving in spite of our increasingly frequent droughts and the general effects of global warming.

When I moved in, I began putting in transplants from my old yard as I was sheet mulching the back. Many of these plants died following the infamous Easter Freeze of 2007 and subsequent drought of Summer 2007. I planted the new yard with a combination of the survivors of that spring and summer and the many plants I've bought or started from friends' plant divisions since. My choices have come from what's available, what fits where, what's on sale, and what comes my way, rather than on the basis of any formal plan. I bought gobs of discounted plants when Charmar went out of business, and take advantage of annual sales at Picadilly Farms and other specialty nurseries in the area, along with Lowe's, which always discounts plants after their growing season has passed. My favorite nursery in the immediate Athens area was Thyme After Thyme until it went out of business in 2012, which produced another mega-buying spree at tremendous discounts. These additions included a lot of plants, and most of the art in the woods.

Like just about any yard in Georgia, the one I inherited was composed largely of compacted red clay. I have spent a great deal of time with a shovel or pick ax loosening it and mixing in just about any organic material that comes my way. In addition to mixing in humus, manure, and top soil from the garden stores, I use the dig and drop method of simply digging a hole and filling it with organic material, then covering it back up with the clay, which has become broken up through the digging process. I've dug all of the following into the soil: shredded paper, kitchen scraps, old cotton clothing, raggedy cotton t-shirts and shorts I have gardened in, wool blankets that have seen better days, leaves, sticks, coffee grounds, tea bags, dryer lint, vacuum cleaner bag contents, cardboard boxes--you name it, if it can break down into soil, it's down there with the worms helping to leaven and enrich the soil, retain water, and drain the area gradually. This method involveslasagna gardening, in which organic materials are layered in or above the ground (for raised beds) and worms and bugs mix them together over time. I then cover the area with either pine straw or wood chips as a weed-preventative mulch, often with paper or cardboard beneath the mulch as an additional sheet mulching measure.

There are several outdoor sculptures in the yard. The two main pieces are the Shaman by Elwood Reynolds, a Cheyenne-Arapaho Indian from whom I bought the piece at the Red Earth Festival in Oklahoma City in 1992; and the Lyman Whitaker spinning sculpture. Additional smaller pieces were collected over time until 2012 when Thyme After Thyme went out of business and discounted their entire inventory, both plants and the many artworks that made their lot such a pleasure to enjoy. These pieces include a set of 5 Asian panels, a lot of "lollipop" sculptures that have a short thin pole that you sink in the ground and an art piece on top, a Greek god/goddess bust, three large vases, a three-piece upright panel with bamboo image, a metal trellis that's so lovely that I don't grow any plants on it, an obelisk, two arbors (one wood that rotted and was replaced in 2019 by a metal arbor, one metal) that provide woodland transitions, and a set of metal reptiles and other pieces that are now on the back deck. And let's not forget the Sewer Guy in the woods and the three-piece dragon that swims off the screened-in porch, and octopus guarding the daylilies.

The yard is always an in-process project that has never looked the same two days in a row, which is one reason I enjoy it so much.