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Garden Rooms Provide Solace for Spring's False Starts

© Carol Wallace

I think that Nature likes to tease us. We waken on some mornings to sunshine and balmy weather and feel quite certain that we missed our opportunity to prune the roses - surely the season is too far advanced! And then the next day we wake to a world of white and wonder what happened.

Spring has already come and gone several times in my zone 6 garden.

But I've found a way to cope. On the sunny days I go outside carrying a tool or two and doing garden things. And on grey, gloomy days like today, I stay indoors and concentrate on creating a trompe l'oeil garden - a surrogate garden for those days when you have no other choice.

I have a tendency to make all my indoor rooms gardens of a sort - whether or not they have actual plant life growing in them. (If I do have actual plant life indoors it is something of a miracle - I am totally inadept with houseplants!) But as much as I enjoy making the outdoors into a series of rooms, I like to make the idoors a series of gardens.

This winter I began the most ambitious indoor garden project of all. My husband, who for years has been cautioning me not to go too overboard, and to absorb some of his own relative conservatism, has suddenly changed his mind. He wants me to create not just a garden, but a jungle in our dining room.

I suppose this all dates back to the day when we were in our rental car on our way to the San Francisco airport. Stopped at a traffic light (and checking watches nervously - we are always late for these things) we both saw it at once and nearly stopped the car - a window display of two gigantic, pure white palm trees. "The Dining Room!" we chorused.

Fortunately, the store was closed, so we made our plane - but the memory of those palm trees lingered for well over ten years. I considered trying to sculpt them from papier mache. I thought about plaster. I went to a theatrical supply store to inquire about celastic. And I thought I finally gave up until, last spring, going through the New Orleans Home and Garden show my husband spotted an 8' high giraffe sculpture and decided he had to have it. That was an hour before we sat our weary feet down at an auction at the back of the Superdome and ended up with a mahogany bird cage that looked like the Taj Mahal.

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