Since publishing my “Gardens and Grounds Part One” post earlier this month, we have made little to no progress on landscaping or otherwise beautifying our yard. If anything, the state of our yard has actually regressed. Thanks to the record-breaking heatwave that has been baking Portland and the wider Pacific Northwest for the past several days, our front yard – already rather sad looking – is now largely dead or dying. The grass is patchy, full of holes where we had previously pulled out monster weeds, and where there is grass, it’s scraggly, yellow, and coarse, like straw. The few potted plants that we’ve managed to nurse along thus far – herbs given to us by Nathan’s mother – are now looking rather worse for the wear.
The only living thing that is currently not only surviving but genuinely thriving is a giant prickly pear that was puzzlingly planted by someone years ago in a front corner of our yard and which has nearly doubled in size since the weather turned warm. Of course the one plant that is doing well is the one that I wouldn’t mind withering away – it being incongruent with my ideal prairie-zen-cottage garden that I alluded to in part one of this post and would eventually like to create but that will likely only ever live in my mind. Aside from my prejudice against its thorny kind, the prickly pear has proven to be a real menace – stabbing ankles and arms of anyone brushing by too closely and relegating a good many tennis balls and one frisbee to the garbage or forever lost to its spiny underbelly.
In the face of these *overused word of the past year* unprecedented times, we have all the more reason to take solace in images of distant, vibrant gardens from other lands and times. So in keeping with the current clime in which I write this, we begin with the arid beauty of desert landscapes.
We now move swiftly along into an adjacent but more temperately situated part of the world, the ever popular Mediterranean. This type of climate is is associated with dry, warm summers and wet, cold winters, encompassing well-known locales like Greece and Croatia as well as southern parts of Spain and France and beyond. Expect to find many flowering shrubs and evergreen tree varietals – usual suspects include the cypress and olive tree.
To balance out all that dry heat, we will now move into the geography-spanning category of gardens with one particular feature in common – water. You may notice that I start to get a bit looser here with my definition of “garden,” lumping parks (which are almost always landscaped with plants and often have some kind of water feature) in together with what you might more strictly think of as a proper garden. But whatever the setting and however it takes form, a water feature provides its visitors with myriad benefits – from the sensory and aesthetic to the environmental and ecological – plus a quiet place for reflection.
Following the natural cycle of things, we progress from water-rich landscapes to our final series of photographs – gardens in full bloom. As the old “April showers” adage goes, water – that life-giving force – makes possible the kind of sensory-overloading botanical displays that occur in the spring and summer months every year in many places all over the world.
Perhaps one day soon I will be able to take inspiration from these photographs to cultivate my own little plot of land – barring any drought-related wildfires or hostile prickly pear takeovers. In the meantime, I’ll continue nightly dousings of our few plants and enjoy our desiccated yard from behind the windows of our climate-controlled house.