My garden is kind of an amorphous (fluid) garden that is, let's say, open to suggestion, but not instruction. This the garden taught me early on it has a mind of its own. If I plant a robinia hispida in a place it doesn't like (I did), by this time next year, it has sent out a 10' long root and re-established itself in a warmer, sunnier spot where it is unabashedly out of scale and inappropriate. I then have to redesign the garden around it, sigh, or try again. This garden resists "design", yet over the years it has, with great patience, taught me what it wants to be and in a few spots I finally think I've nailed it, design-wise. It has even allowed me to have pretty much what I wanted, here and there just sufficient so that I don't get utterly discouraged and sell it to a goat farmer.
It has a friendly and personable street-face and merrily interfaces with neighbours and passerbys on their way to the nearby beach. In fact it is responsible for the making of many new friends and sociable relations with the neighbourhood in general in keeping with the Chinese garden philosophy that any proper private garden must also present a public face for the benefit of the community.
It welcomes and nurtures my guests to the B&B suite which is integrated into my home and garden. It adopts bent, twisted , battle-scarred and orphaned plants that I rescue from unappreciative nurseries and demolition sites. It tests the mettle of prospective new plants, using the "grow or die" principle of island-worthiness. It hosts my plant passions as they rise and fall; a variety of hardy Cyclamen, swaths of yellow, crème and pink trout and fawn lilies, mounds of early blue flowering Hepatica, an overabundance of blue-eyed-mary (Omphalodes) and silver leaved Brunnera, a diversity of Hebes, gnarly shrubs and vines, an arbutus grove that inexplicably flourishes inland from the shoreline, a few massive cedars and a fir, a gnarled laburnum and an overhanging arbutus at the entrance. It feeds the "little life" of the garden; the bees, butterflies, hummingbirds and robins.
A clever robin several years back figured out that if she followed me around while I gardened, there would be a labour-free banquet of fat, delicious worms. She has since passed this knowledge along to a sequence of hatchlings and I now have an ever growing family of merry robins (the bug club) traipsing along behind me while I work. They also steal my moss for their nests and I walk the moss garden, not softly, as you might assume, but by stamping around like a mad bull, pressing shredded moss cushions back into contact with the soil.
The moss garden is one of the most lovely aspects of the garden and not one that I can claim much credit for except in my role of opening the forest canopy to invite in the rain and light necessary to expand on it. The moss garden rests at the bottom of the sloped property and is a serene and restful place, surrounded by tall conifers interspersed with alder. It is hard to improve upon a natural moss garden. It has to be experienced to be appreciated.
My garden has a lot of responsibilities. It lives up to most of them, at least some of the time. It is open to suggestions.
WYNN NIELSEN
