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Bones in the Garden - A Tale of Garden Planning, Part 1

© Carol Wallace

There is NOTHING I love more than planting. And nothing more exciting than planting a brand new garden. Since common sense (and my husband) told me that I should probably put a hold on digging more beds in my own yard this year, I was absolutely thrilled when Audrey, my neighbor across the street, had her entire front lawn dug up for some foundation repair. I plotted and planned ways to convince her to replace a lot of that lawn with garden, but when I wandered over one day prepared to do my worst she surprised me.

"I'm thinking of not putting a lawn back at all," she told me before I was even all the way across the street. "What do you think about making this whole front yard a garden."

Naturally, I was thrilled, because since her sons grew up and moved to Boston, her yard has basically been MY garden. She likes the look and experience of a garden, but isn't really much into the plotting planning and planting that I thrive on. So here was my dream - not only a nice, blank canvas, but one I would see every day looking out the front window.

"Better worry about winter," my husband remarked to me as I began to plan. "If she looks out her window and sees nothing but bare dirt she's going to change her mind really fast." He was nodding sagely at our own side yard, which is full of hostas and other things now dormant and invisible.

As a result I have spent much of the past month with books on winter gardens piled around me. And finally I have begun to draw up a plan.

First - the basics. In the fall I made sure that the contractors put down good soil and dealt with any drainage issues. We have clay soil around here, and so a good bed of gravel and deep tilling are essential. We then spread a good pile of mulch and manure over the front yard. In spring this will be ready for planting.

The next thing I needed to plan was the "bones" of the new garden. Garden bones are not as spooky as they sound. They are the permanent and obviously structural things in the yard - trees, hedges, paths, and benches.

The importance of bones cannot be overstressed. My own yard would look dead without them, buried as it us under a thick blanket of snow right now. As it is the dwarf conifers, the weeping tree skeletons, arbors, gazebo, stone walls and pathways provide some kind of winter interest, even if it is in black and white right now.