The wild places

When M and I first found this house, we started dreaming up a garden filled with fruit trees and vegetable beds. A garden to emulate, on an only slightly smaller scale, my mom's 20+ fruit and nut trees, four raised beds, grape arbor, old section of lower beds and the brambles. By the time we moved in, spring had already sprung and the East Fence was obscured by the thicket.

Left untended for too many seasons, the Plum had sent out suckers, which grew into saplings. The Apple, starved for light and run through by plum suckers, had begun growing topsy turvy toward any available patch of sunlight. The Apricot and Nectarine were so thick with unpruned growth and nearly intertwined, that we couldn't see through to the fence or get through to harvest or tend.

Left to its own devices while we tended to interior issues first, the garden went wild and got unruly. Liz came over and helped us battle the thicket of plum suckers, but then all the light-starved others went mad with sunshine, put on new leaves, new growth, and disrupted their sense of season. So now, well into winter, our Apple has stubbornly refused to drop its leaves while the recently pruned Apricot is spiking out all over with leaf spurs.

We'd hoped to put in a couple citrus by now, but the battle to prune, rehabilitate and maintain these four trees is enough to keep us busy this coming year. Maybe then we'll plant M's blood orange, or discover how the sprinklers work, or finish taking out the Stone Circle.

We are new to home ownership and only budding arborists, so I hope we didn't do any harm as we snipped, sawed, clipped and guessed our way through this year's pruning. My mother will probably come over and find plenty of things we could have done better. If any of them wish to voice their displeasure by dying on us, I hope it's the Plum. M tells me it's quite tasty (for a Plum), and that we should keep it. I eat one or two plums a year, and if I miss a year I don't terribly mind. I will have to find an appreciation for more than their color.

All in all, it's rather nice to see the back fence. Some parts of it have been hidden since we first met the house. I've scaled back my gardening ambitions. Everything takes so much longer than I was expecting, so maybe it's good that we didn't hurry up and create a lot more work for ourselves in the yard. With the rain coming down and the grass growing up, we'll have more than enough to do this Spring and Summer just trying to make it through til Fall.