I've been working in the garden since mid-March, about the
time lockdown started here in Norway. Apart from working at home and remaining
indoors, the garden has been the only free space available to me when I am
outdoors, and I am immensely grateful for that. I have taken the occasional
walk around the neighbourhood, but ran into too many people for there to be
safe social distancing. And that's not so strange considering we live in a
city. So it's been nice to escape to my garden, and there's been plenty of work
to do since March--raking, clearing away dead twigs, turning the soil, cutting
back a number of trees and bushes, spreading grass seed, sowing out vegetable
and flower seeds in the greenhouse, cutting away the dead canes in the
raspberry patch, weeding the raspberry and strawberry patches (this can take
hours), and transplanting some bushes from one place to another. Plus I've
bought more plants, mostly perennial flowers, to round out the garden, and they
needed to be planted. It may not sound like enough work for a couple of months,
but it is, especially since I am not in the garden full-time. If I was, it
might go faster, but since I'm still working full-time, it all takes time. And
that's ok for now.
We finally got the roughly 12 square meters behind the
greenhouse 'returned' to us last summer, and I decided to make this space
another 'room' in the garden. Last autumn, I planted allium, tulips, scilla,
spring snowflakes, grape hyacinths, regular hyacinths and narcissus (a type of
daffodil), all of them bulbs, and they have all come up. We also bought a
wisteria tree and a magnolia tree and planted them in this space, as well as a
lilac bush. The magnolia tree is blossoming now, and its blossoms are a lovely
reddish-pink color. I decided that I wanted a stone path leading from the
vegetable garden area up to and behind the greenhouse, so I bought some slate
stones and embedded them in the soil, and sowed grass seed around them. I
bought pachysandra plants and planted them along the path, in the hope that
these hardy plants will begin to thrive and spread out.
There is always a new project to work on in the garden, and
I love each one--both the planning and the execution. Whenever I think I'm
'finished', I realize shortly thereafter that I'm not, and never will be.
Gardens are works in progress.
