Home Garden Companion

Ilona's Garden Journal

buy quality plants
  • Plant Library On The Journal
  • Garden chores
    • Do as I say
  • Ilona’s Garden Home
    • Old House Blog
    • Garden Librarian
  • Ilona’s Garden Flavor Shop
  • Privacy Policy

Garden Stories and Memories the rural story

My Rural Garden

Or How I Got To Be Here

…it all begins somewhere.

I had been gardening in the city for some years. I don’t remember ever wishing to move into a country place, particularly, but my city neighborhood was deteriorating and my family size was increasing. My interest in history, and then gardening, began to branch towards homesteading. It was the seventies that developed that trend, and so by 1980 I found myself here on a plain that was so flat that it looks as though God took a plasterer’s knife and scraped it hard across the land. The farmers took things further in the ’60’s and began felling all the trees in sight. All for endless acres of corn and soybean. Until I began planting there was very little between me and the far horizon westward. One can see storms coming from a long way off, their anvil-piled wrath thundering in from the west. Long pale gray strips of slanting rainfall give sight to storms across the landscape far away. In the aftermath are visions of light rays that step forth from the masses of breaking clouds.

Sunsets, too, are bright and unhindered, now only trimmed at their horizon line by my trees and bushes. But there are places, still, where one can see the sun melt into earths crust, sherbert colors left too long upon the sky’s table, inking dark the night with its liquefied rays. Twilight is a Parrish painting of silhouette against an oddly transparent blue, like looking long into a darkly clear ocean. This is the best part of being on the cusp of a visually endless plain.

As a gardener I was impressed by the soil, and knew nothing yet of the domineering winds which cut through this garden at all times of the year. The soil is what was left from the wet prairie which kept this area unpopulated and uncultivated until relatively lately… when after the cattle barons of Ohio (oh, yes, there were some, once) gave way to inventive farmers who laboriously dug deep ditches to carry off the ponded water which had disallowed cultivation until too late in the growing season. My property lays at the head of one of those deeply dug ditches, the only elevation difference in the land, unseen until nearly upon them. The Midwestern Haha.

I know my little acres were once very different than when I arrived here, as I had met and talked with a former occupant of the house whose father had purchased this place in 1915, when she was a young girl of 16 years. But by my time, the oaks were gone, the orchard no more, and only the silver maples were the trees that hugged the house incongruently with a misshapen Norway spruce, whose own story was one of tornado force winds tearing out its upper parts leaving opened arms reaching out for mercy.

Two of the largest arborvitae I had ever seen stood marking a long, longgone, front path which she told me was the place she and her brothers rode bikes straight into what was then a ditch her depression era father paid to have covered… for fear of his children’s wellbeing. I realized then that arborvitae are not shrubs for foundations or in proximity to a house… they are full fledged trees when mature. From signs at the corners of the house it seems some were once planted there as well- remaining long past the time they could be tolerated, or should have been.

The house had the unwelcoming hodgepodge of partly planted, partly weed grown things around a deeply listing front porch, I pulled out a number of weedy silver maple tree saplings and gave them to a neighbor. Helped her plant them, actually. The crowded mailorder (I’m pretty sure!) combination of forsythia, weigela, and bridal spirea were all cramped into the area under the front window. I dug each one out and moved them to far reaches of the property. a large rangy growth of lilac with an empty center remains in the front. It embraces my garden bench and presents offerings of common lilac each spring. It has too much history to cut down, and I am too old now to attempt it, anyway. It will likely outlive me.

Most of the yard was mown grass. Something in me does not love a lawn, though I appreciate it in its place. So to the disgruntlement of the children, and sometimes the husband, I have ever enlarged the garden beds and sometimes surrendered some of them back to the prairie grass beginnings, grudgingly, but of necessity. But grass is my form of nefarious weed. I still plot to take back my front border from its greedy grasp.

The ruined pig barn had a trimming of elderberry bushes, and the back acres were farmed… and that is what I found here when first beginning my garden. And that is where I leave us until I write about the garden’s development.


DISCLOSURE: I may be an affiliate for products that I recommend. If you purchase those items through my links I will earn a commission. You will not pay more when buying a product through my link. Thank you, in advance for your support! Privacy Policy
« Earliest Inkling: Garden Plants of My Childhood
Willow Crafting »

Oh, hi there!

I was a garden blog pioneer, and began writing on this blog in 2003. Before that I had begun a garden website that has been at its own domain since 2006, Ilona's Garden.

I still love writing, gardening, and art after all these years, although travel and grandchildren have become a big part of my life, now.

Standouts

Do You Grow Herbs? 10 Reasons To Love Them

There are so many ways to enjoy herb plants, that they are not for herb gardens only. Think about tucking them into the landscape, into containers or into your home. I do I enjoy thee? Oh, Herb, Let me count the ways! 10 Ways I Enjoy Herbs (and you can, too!) In companion plantings, herbs […]

10 Cool Season Annual Flowers To Plant

Shirley poppies and Bachelor Buttons Not every garden writer alerts you to the fact that annuals can have seasons that are shorter than other choices. For places like Ohio which have hot summers, there are common annuals that only do well when our weather is cooler, such as in early summer. Those flowers sort of […]

Newest Postings Here

  • HELLLOOOO, From The Other Side
  • February Gardening, Last of Winter in the Flower Garden
  • Compilation of Past Mini-Posts of 2003
  • Wayback in Ilona Garden Time
  • 3 Tips For Landscaping Successfully With Ornamental Trees

Finding your way home via the garden path


Read reviews from the GardenLibarian

Visit For A Spell

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Youtube
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • Google +
  • Wanelo

Portrait of a Gardener

gardener musings

Musings

What’s Wrong With Today’s Gardening?

Modern gardening

What Is Wrong?

Garden Journal

fine garden journal

Journal, Planner and Log Book

Shop Small Trees and More

People’s Choice

Wayback in Ilona Garden Time

posted in Uncategorized

1910 garden plan

3 Tips For Landscaping Successfully With Ornamental Trees

posted in Landscape Design Know-How, Landscape Trees

Garden update

Mid-Ohio Gardening Update

posted in 2018, How's the weather?

All Season Garden Color with Bold Foliage Effects, Masterful Contrasts

posted in Garden design ideas, Landscape Design Know-How


Bonsai Trees

Stay updated!

Get all the latest tasty goodness straight to your inbox!

Topics

Past Posts

Join Me

  • Facebook
  • Google+
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Garden Enthusiasm

Garden Enthusiasm Delivered

* indicates required

View previous campaigns.

Meta

  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.org

Copyright © 2021 · Part of Ilona’s Garden by Ilona Erwin