Gardening Glimpses: The Cement Garden

When the world is too loud and raucous, retire to the gardens of Grandmother's world
The Cement Garden

Came across this essay in my computer’s gardening folder and during the read I discovered that I smiled again from the memory.

Before, in an earlier gardening missive I waxed on about my gardens-to-be, including a few pics of plants I intend to purchase.

Below is a picture of those plants I have ALREADY ordered and, indeed, already placed lovingly into the ground. For Grandmother’s gardens will be lovely this coming year. They are already blooming in my mind.

Read on below the picture for my sad but funny tale of the cement garden. I’ve moved from the lot described and am now creating my own gardens in the swamp of Delaware. But ah, what I learned from my years dealing with a pie-shaped, sloped waterfront lot in the wilds of Merryland.

Ready to Grow This Spring in Grandmother's Gardens. 


The Cement Garden

The day dawned magnificently sweet as all days should when a new garden is about to be formed. Which one would that bright June day when I’d finally, after five years of living with that bare corner on the far side of the lot, fashion a garden that was the result of much thought.

The lot’s fence began ten feet back from street level. The corner in question was at the upper left of the fence’s beginning. I never knew why there wasn’t a handsome garden in that interesting corner when my father and the lot’s former owner had tucked a garden into every nook and cranny of the land.

The five year delay in getting to it encompasses pretty much the entire time my husband and I had lived on this sloping lot situated on a cove off of the Chesapeake Bay. For that entire time I watched that strange corner and waited for something to grow from it.

Nothing did.

So I figured my Dad never thought it a good place for a garden but I, now quite knowledgeable on all things horticultural, had composed a garden plan that would include the plants that would love the shade under the tall oaks alongside of it, and would brighten that dark corner with a wink of periwinkle.

I’d purchased the healthy plants from the nursery and had them setting in place, in the containers of their purchase, right where the plan was for them to stay. That night I regarded the plantings: some hostas, periwinkle for the edges, an Aster for Fall, and colorful impatiens scattered throughout, and knew that tomorrow they would be happy and content in their intended spot with their roots deep in the earth.

On that bright June day I took the shovel in hand and headed to the corner garden. The plantings awaited their removal from the pot and placement into the garden.

The very first thrust of the shovel caused the tool to shake so hard my teeth chattered. For it wasn’t dirt below my shovel but something very hard. I thrust the shovel into the ground again, curious about the rock of my earlier thrust and so rare in the area’s sandy soil. Again my teeth chattered.

Years of rotting leaves and general earthly debris had covered that cement triangle in such a matter that it looked for all the world as if a proper dirt-covered piece of land. Because of the erosion problem of the lot, my father had evidently put a cement pad in that corner.

I had to go out to the store again that day. This time I purchased handsome planters that would hold hostas, periwinkle and masses of impatiens. The Cement Garden now twinkles with happy plants in handsome containers, all placed about the triangle in a beautiful arrangement.

It appears as if this were the garden plan right along.