Balls & Grass... A Chapter Of My Memoir, Or A Garden Problem's Solution?

 

Summer 2008... I add the bowling ball (far left side of photo)

Summer 2009... the Husband adds the pillar

The garden was designed & executed with intention of providing food, water, shelter & materials for birds & other critters & with aesthetic balance that reflects my tastes for excess & the husband's innate artistic sense of balance. Except for the fact that I always make note of the tasks & decisions that have yet to be actualized, I feel that at Post Apocalyptic Bohemia we have succeeded for the most part. The Garden is lush, & plants were chosen for leaf shape & size & not for colorful flowers & we make use of many grass varietals. Grasses are a current favorite plant group.

But, Gardening is not an avocation where you can say- "well, I am done...there it is, my garden." Changes are made daily & tastes change nearly as often. The house came with a backyard full of ivy & blackberries, a dog run & the posts from an old clothesline. Over time, we got rid of the unwanted elements, except for a large cement filled pipe. The husband tried sawing through it & digging it up. I suggested making it look "on purpose" & added a bowling ball to the top as a witty finial. Last summer the Husband put an old hollow pillar right over the top & voila... the pipe was gone & the Post Apocalyptic Bohemian aesthetic reached out even further into the world.

Summer 2009, except for the balls I add, the pillar stands alone

This year the pillar solution was just not good enough for the Husband. He used a damaged, cracked trough, last year's table in the Boys' Fort, & transformed it into a raised bed with variegated grasses. He cut a hole for the cemented pipe & lifted the empty trough right over the top, filled it with soil & compost. This is the solution for one of the garden's problem spots in Summer 2010:

The process

Summer 2010

Extra added photo view, my bog garden, planted in an old sitz bath that I found in a pile of garbage from a vacated house in our Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle.  I spied it on a dog walk &I carried the sitz bath home with 2 leashed dogs at 2am on a summer morning. It has had many uses, often as a water feature. This is the 2nd season of the sitz  bath bog garden: