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Robert Canterbury's Raised Bed Urban Garden

© Carol Wallace

This is actually not a before picture, since I had to remove a great deal of rubbish, including a smelly upholstered couch, from the yard and move the stockade fence to the back of the 24'x40' plot to create a semi-clean slate. The tree on the right is a white mulberry which I eventually cut down as it was getting entirely too large, and has since been replaced by an offshoot that grew from the stump and is now pretty much the size of the tree in the picture.The shrub on the left is a yew which still exists. This photo was taken along about March of '81.

I think if I'd known what I was doing, I would have been dangerous, but not knowing, I just plunged ahead building raised beds from cinder blocks with no mortar and topped with patio blocks. The beds in the rear section were faced with now-illegal creosoted landscape ties which I finally replaced last year. They were totally rotten and there were worms (and other critters) living in them. The rear section was completed in 1981 and new raised bed sections were added over a period of years. Which brings us to the after, which isn't really an after either, since it was taken in 1997, but it is pretty much as the garden appears today.

In 1986, the auto body shop on the next street over added dumpsters to their parking lot and, citing security, cut down all of the shrubs they had allowed me to plant along their chain link fence. In response, I spent an intense two weeks designing and building a 16' tall lattice fence on my property line.Because the fence was structurally stronger verticallythan horizontally, it twisted in a violent storm the next spring and the result is seen at right. Needless to say, I rebuilt, adding a new pergola and it is still standing, 12 years later. The ivy that has grown on it (the main vines are 2"-3" thick) surely increases the structural integrity.

Also in the late eighties I added beds along the fence between the properties and planted a Blue Atlas Cedar and six Blaze climbing roses. Four of the bushes survive to this day and the cedar is 25' tall (I measured it this morning)! This is in 18" of soil!

In 1983, in order to cover a disused metal louvered opening in the wall of the

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