Building A Damp Garden
If you sink up to your knees when you go into your garden, you won't understand the longing for plants who like it wet that festers in the hearts of those who garden on dry ground. After losing one more lot of seed grown candelabra primroses to summer drought three years ago, I decided to make a bog. Well, it's not really a bog, but it's a garden that always remains damp and sometimes pretty down right soggy.
I had the unprecedented presence of mind to document this process with photographs so that I can share it with you, now that I've had it long enough to see what works and what doesn't.
Prolog
Like most of my garden projects, this one started out innocently enough and developed into a summer's long proposition, repaying an immense amount of sweat and strain with a certain amount of enlightenment.
Thinking 'bog', my main concern was how to keep anyplace in my free-draining clay continually moist in the face of summer drought. After some thought, I realized that the drain pipes connected to our gutters terminated in a bit of woods just below the garage at the end of my latest clearing and planting. It seemed to me that if I could incorporate those pipes into the scheme, I would be assured of water during rain and could stick a hose down one of the downspout boots if things got really dry, thus providing water from below, as many boggy places receive it.
This seemed like a brilliant idea and one that could be "easily" implemented. That is, until I cleared the undergrowth away from the spot where the drain pipes daylighted and realized that if I wanted a bed larger than a postage stamp I would have to shift the huge pile of rotting logs that had been dumped there eight years before, When we built an addition, the tree cutters put them there, intending to return and cut them into firewood...a task that rather got lost in the shuffle. There they remained, slowly rotting away, hosting an assortment of weeds, shrubs and young trees saplings.
So, one summer's day about three years ago, I took myself down to the woods and started clearing and shifting logs, piling them up neatly outside the area I planned to make into my damp garden.
Tools
As I shifted and stacked, it became clear that I needed more than my gloved hands and one by one, tools were fetched from the garage.
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