Waste Not, Want Not Philosophy Takes Root In Recycled Garden

Craig Rognholt sits at one of his water gardens. The garden is "an orphanage of recycled goods." The structures, a garden shed, arbor and pergola were made from lumber recycled from theatrical sets, the pavers that edge the lawn are from a neighbor's garage.

If you don't believe in reincarnation, a visit to Craig Rognholt's Minneapolis garden might change your mind.

Almost everything in the small but innovative garden — the winding walking paths, the undulating raised beds, the angled arbor — started life as something else.

With the creative flair of an artist, the how-to of a handyman and the daring of a Dumpster diver, Rognholt has reinvented his once overgrown back yard with reused materials.

He lined the walking paths with pavers that he harvested — one wheelbarrow at a time — from the floor of a neighbor's aging garage, which was being torn down. He busted up his crumbling sidewalk and patio and fit the pieces together to form the raised beds. And he built the arbor that shelters the limestone patio he installed, the pergola that defines the side entrance to the garden and the charming garden shed that connects the garage to the garden from lumber that had been used in theater sets and was headed for the Dumpster.

Even the plants are recycled.

As soon as he carved out his first raised bed, "people starting bringing things over," he said. "First it was neighbors and relatives. Then it was relatives of neighbors and friends of neighbors. I was so grateful to be getting plants, I didn't care what I was getting."

Luckily for Rognholt, the hand-me-downs included such sought-after perennials as moonbeam coreopsis, autumn joy sedum, Asiatic lilies and, of course, dozens of hostas.

"The hostas came in bulk," he said.

Because they proved to be perfect for the mostly shady site, he still grows hosta in bulk. But he's added a host of gift plants (campanula, meadow rue and snakeroot), several junipers (harvested, with permission, from a yard that was slated to be relandscaped) and even sections of sod to the mix.

Rognholt started his garden in 1996 when he and his partner, Brian Kelvington, bought the 100-year-old house. His job as stage technician for the Guthrie Theater offered him day hours to devote to gardening and, at times, access to discarded materials.

He started in the front yard, notching boulders into the steep slope to create a terraced garden that he filled with monarda, phlox, liatris and Russian sage. Then he moved to the back. While it was larger and flatter, the back yard presented a sizable challenge because it sloped toward the house, causing water to pool near the house.

He tore up the grass and dug out the soil to lower the level of the back yard. Then he used that soil to fill the raised beds he built. To allow more light to filter through, he removed invasive buckthorn shrubs and thinned the overgrown lilacs, which were draped with Virginia creeper. Nothing was wasted. He cut and stacked the trimmings in the alley, where someone else recycled it into firewood. And he used the Virginia creeper to make wreaths.

Later, with Kelvington's help, he added two ponds, which he lined with scrounged concrete and flagstone, and decorative fencing.

Rognholt's garden, like all gardens, is a work-in-progress. "The cliche is that a garden is never done, it just keeps metamorphosing," he said.

But he's put a moratorium on freebie plants. Instead of digging permanent homes for the cast-offs, his garden now functions as a foster home. He tends to most new arrivals only until he can find a home for them.

Rognholt said that the six years spent on his garden, which he describes as a "meditative laboratory," have taught him about patience, generosity and "the cycle of life."

But he credits his father, Jon, an accountant and jack-of-all-trades, with his reuse ethic: "I'd go to the dump with my dad when I was a boy and we'd drop off one thing and pick up something else."

Call it the recycle of life.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.shns.com.)