Moving a Garden

Despite the difficulty of leaving a garden behind, I continue to garden and add new plants wherever I live. During the past four years, I have added several perennial beds, including one surrounding a koi pond. I know when the time comes to move from here, I'll once again leave with sadness as I say goodbye to my family of plants, flowers and fish.

--Cindy Martin

I lived in Dillon, Colorado, for 10 years where the altitude was approximately 10,000 feet. I spent a lot of time and money landscaping our backyard, doing most of the work myself. I put in a beautiful stone patio that was set in a sand base and I spent many hours planting woolly thyme between all of the rocks to give it a very soft feel. My kids learned to walk on that patio, and they were fascinated by the fuzzy green plants that sprung up everywhere beneath their tiny feet. The patio was flanked by long raised beds that I filled with fat orange Oriental poppies and endless colors of columbine. Below the beds I planted a sea of wildflowers that somehow always bloomed in reds, whites and blues in time for the Fourth of July, which happens to be my son's birthday.

The growing season there was very short but very sweet. I've lived in northeast Ohio now for the last five years where the summers can be sweltering. I brought a five-pound bag of Colorado wildflower seed mix with me, and when we moved into our current home I sprinkled that seed mix everywhere. I have some of the most beautiful columbines and lupines that take me back to that wonderful garden I created in Colorado. And when we go to the local greenhouses and nurseries here in Ohio, my kids always want to "pet" the woolly thyme and bring some home.

--Kim Reed

--Anne Wellman
Newark, DE

Time marches forward, though... [With] increasing development in northern Virginia, our house and neighborhood were slated for demolition and redevelopment. Where once stood 27 homes on a little more than 30 acres [there would be] hundreds of apartments and townhomes. All that we had tended so lovingly and all that our neighbors had cherished were to be reduced to a flat building plat with the work of a few bulldozers. It was a very emotional time for us all.

In the interest of preserving all that I could, we set about finding a piece of property that would be secure from the threat of development and began moving everything. We moved almost our entire yard and gathered plants from [all] 26 neighbors. The trees that were too large to move, we had cut down and I took them to the saw mill. They now await a woodworker to turn them into a grandfather clock for my husband and perhaps some silverware chests for our children, maybe even a cradle or two.

As I look out my window now, I can see the blue spruce that my oldest son had his first-day-of-school picture taken by 19 years ago. I can walk about my yard and recall the neighbors even though we all relocated in different areas. Moving the garden was a huge task but I am so happy that I did everything I could to preserve the neighborhood in my new home. We had lived there for almost 20 years and we wanted to have the garden we had worked so hard come with us.

Over 90 percent of the plants we moved survived; from astilbe to viburnum, our plants flourish in our new location, and a walk around our yard reminds us of all our friends.

--Evelyn A. Carr