Sometimes there would be years when work was all consuming that plans to improve our own garden were put on hold. This was especially true during the years when I did most of the gardening work so that Robert could work on his artful welding. I would realize halfway through the summer, “This is another lost year in the garden”, and the bindweed, horsetail, and creeping buttercup would win again.
Our new cat, Maddy, continued to like small baskets. She was now our only cat because my beloved Orson, my best cat ever, died in spring of 1999….I came home to find him sleeping in the same spot as in the morning, and when I patted him to tease him about it, he was cold. He had only recently forgiven me for getting Maddy and started sitting on my lap again; he was only 14 and I hope the stress of my having brought a kitten home did not hasten his demise. We buried him near the pond.
Over the summer, backhoe madness continued on the properties to the north and south of us (both owned by the same person). Below, this is what the hills looked like on both sides of us by the end of that summer, with just one block’s thickness of trees that belonged to the city between us and the scalped hill to the south; this was the view to our north.
Fortunately, our house had only one window looking in that direction, and the others looked into our garden to the east, south, and west.
In late 1999, I adopted two feral kittens who had born and lived their early kittenhood under the Shelburne Inn. I thought Maddy WANTED company, but she hated them intensely. They were so shy that I despaired of ever making friends with them; first, they lived under the bathtub, and when outside they would hide under the porch until patiently lured by me, often standing in the rain, with canned catfood.
2000
The biggest personal gardening event for me was the acquisition of my first computer in January, 2000. I had been partly inspired by Ann Lovejoy‘s amazement when she learned in 1999 (at the workshop in Cannon Beach) that I did not have an email address!
The shrubs along the mid-north side of the garden were finally starting to grow up enough to hide the neighbours house…. just in time for a major sewage back up which in that winter required us digging a ditch through the garden, in pouring rain, all down one side. Thank heavens Robert had been a plumber and knew how to lay the new sewer pipe. It turned out the old line had gone under the huge spruce tree area and a big root had crushed it. The culmination was, when buying the last section of pipe (and sinking further into debt), someone at the lumber store closed the back end of our van and pushed the pipe right through our windshield. Another $300. All I craved was one peaceful winter with no car breakdown or home repair crisis. Perhaps such a winter would make Robert happy at last.
Summer in the middle, shady part of the garden: A Decaisnea which had grown large and would eventually tower over my head.
Below: Rose ‘Ghislane de Feligonde’ had come with me from Seattle, to the Sou’wester, then Shakti Cove, and then my new garden. I had acquired it at a wonderful old rose garden in Snohomish, probably in 1989, on the advice of the rosarian.
I successfully brought it with me in late 2010 to my new Lake Street garden.
Our new cats, Miss Marble and Dumbles, had finally become friendly to us. They were still skittish, and friends found it hard to believe they existed as they skedaddled at the sight of anyone but me or Robert. When we took them to be spayed and neutered, we were told “Sorry, we could not spay Marble”…because she was a boy. We tried to call her “he” and change her name to the “Masked Marble”, but Marble was a she to us for the rest of her life.
Can you see the resemblance to a cat’s eye marble in the swirl on her face?
Robert frequently changed the water feature outside the front door . Eventually, we had to give up on the fountain aspect because wind would blow the water sideways till the reservoir was dry. We were seeking a splashy sound to mask the daily backhoe noise as our neighbour, seemingly pointlessly, moved dirt from one side of his lots to another and back again. (Within another year, he had tired of it and moved on to an area closer to his home further up the hill, and the alders grew back and after awhile you could not even tell what he had done.)
Leave a comment