Lean Into the Past with Found Objects: Remants of Time Add Weight and Depth to a Garden

Cities are moving people

Who just forgot their lives.

--Cy Curnin of The Fixx

Old farm houses like this one, which I pass daily on my way to work, inform my garden.

June.  Summer time.  A smack-a-fly-dead day.  This valley is me.  This place I know deeply.  I sit in my recliner and stare out the window.  Heavy sunlight glistens off the oaks my brother and I planted 14 years ago.  I have known them since they were six inches tall.  Rye gently sways before them.  My eyes are weighted.  There is depth here.  I lean into this place and it accepts me.  We are not separate.  There was a time when many people had such a connection.  So much of humanity has vacated place.  I don't understand it.  I accept it.  I know what it is like.  I have lived in apartments and have moved when rent increased.  I know that world.  I have sat still on the expressway under an intense sun staring at a glass box office building waiting for the traffic to move.  But it has never been me.  Here is where I have always been--this great western valley with less than two people per square mile.

One of the Oaks Lloyd and I planted 17 years ago viewed through a wine glass that sits in the window.

I think it is important something of our past remains.  Perhaps, we can't all be farmers.  Perhaps we can't all sit on ninety acres and listen to cicadas sing while looking at the world through the stem of a wine glass. Perhaps for most of us, home will be temporary, but we can garden whatever lot or balcony we have intensely, personally, hands stained black by soil.  And we can bring in remnants of time, symbols of a past that wasn't plastic--a rusted wheelbarrow, an old iron bolt, a weathered shingle, a broken cinder block--ghostly messages from a world that wasn't digital.

To me, it seems vital.

An old hay rake that was on the property when my parents purchased it.

A vignette that I set up in the old pig shed.

A recycled mushroom bed from a local mushroom farm that I set on it's side to form a wall.

I built this hanging bucket garden to tie in with the pig shed, the last standing farm building.

Below are some a couple of YouTube videos with great ideas for bringing the past into your garden.

And finally here are a couple of great videos by the Fixx on the collapse of farming communities and man's isolation from the soil.