How to Create Big-Garden Impact with a Few Plants or Reflections on the Creative Process

Mother's Day Garden--Labor, 4-hours, cost $50 (without the bench)

I was a writer long before I knew how to write well.  Although I wrote a few things in high school, the drive to create worlds on paper came pretty much all at once--the summer I first fell in love.  I’d had crushes in high school, but I’d never been consumed.  Then, while working myself though college, I met Shideh, a gorgeous Iranian, with long kinky black hair, a slender nose and a mischievous pirate’s smile. At least at first, she was also interested in me, but I didn’t have a clue how to deal with my new feelings and soon botched things up royally.

I didn’t have a clue how to fix reality.  I realize now being myself probably would have worked just fine, but at the time that didn’t occur to me, and so I was driven to correct the course of events on paper.  Even after I’d recovered from that fiasco, my compulsion to reorder my universe on paper didn’t subside until many years later when I found happiness.  Then all of the sudden, I had no reason to write.  For whatever reason that drive seems to have returned despite my contentment, which is good, because I’m not one of those artists willing to sacrifice happiness for the sake of art. If you have to stay hungry, so to speak, to be creative, I’d rather work at the bank, live in the suburbs and come home to a wonderful wife and kids.  Let someone else be driven to genius by their personal demons.  I want to live.

The important thing here is that I became a writer long before I could write.  Compulsion was the key.  I think some years from now I will look back at my new urge to landscape the same way.  At the time I recreated my world to where Shideh and I lived in a Le Corbusier-like glass and steel mansion perched on a sandstone mesa looking over Lake Powell near Bullfrog Marina, I thought I was writing well.  In fact, I thought I was a genius.  Only later, when I learned my craft, did I realize I’m only almost adequate.

I think I’m at the, I’m-a-genius stage as a gardener.  And since experience has taught me it won’t last, I’m going to enjoy my pompous, ignorant bliss as long as I can.  I’m going to assert, make recommendations, get on my high horse, and tell you what exactly needs to be done.  Then, somewhere down the line, I’ll have to retract most of what I’ve said and start all over again.  But, that’s how we create: first with unreasonable passion and then with restrained will.

So, here is my garden creed now:  1) when possible, work with the stone and plants already there; 2) use flowers as accents along the edges of nature, where you want to pop-up the borders;   3) use natural contours, paths and structures to consolidate textures and colors into larger patterns.

The site--Boulders and the shade from a tree
allowed some natural grasses to take hold.

Here, I created a mother’s day garden for my mother-in-law, Bonnie, using these principles.  My father-in-law, Wally, actually did most of the work over time by throwing rocks he liked under a tree.  The rocks and shade from the tree together altered the sandy, desert environment enough for wild grasses to come up.  Those rocks and grasses were all I needed to create a fairly inexpensive garden that took less than four hours to create.   Yet, the rocks and grasses were not a garden in and of themselves.  In the wild, they would have been beautiful, but on the lot, they just looked scruffy because there was neither a transition nor a border.  In the wild, the landscape would slowly transition from sand to savannah as the shade grew. Or, just as likely a creek or something would separate the two.  Here, neither happened.  So, my job was to make something happen.

The finished garden.  Path, rail and drive create an island. 
A small ribbon of flowers pop the edges.  Black hanger and lantern tie in the bench. 
Flowers--$25;  Lantern--$12; hanger--$9