Garden Project #1 – A Front Yard Garden Retainer Wall
Friends: This winter we can look forward to reading about an innovative garden project by cookiebuxton.com’s guest contributor Daryl D. Daryl is an Interior Designer, which partly explains her wonderful insight into the colours, textures, and contrasts that make a garden so appealing. In addition to her professional skill, Daryl has the eye of an artist, and that is her natural gift as well as a trained talent. I am pleased to introduce the first of Daryl’s articles in the series, Garden Project # 1: A Front Yard Retainer Wall, written about her first garden project undertaken when she and her husband bought their home. Daryl’s first garden plan was to install a retaining wall so that she could plant her garden to face her front window, instead of planting the garden to face the street. Follow this interesting project each month as Daryl presents her next articles in the series, with one article posted each month over the course of the winter, under Garden Projects on www.cookiebuxton.com.
Garden Project #1 – A Front Yard Garden Retainer Wall.
Written by: Guest Contributor Daryl D.
I have had a passion for gardening from almost the minute my husband and I moved into our home over 30 years ago. Once I had some time after the first changes were made in our new home, I imagined what I might be able to do outside over the next few years. Mine is a relatively small-sized yard, an average of 50 by 100 feet, depending how you look at it. And of course a yard can’t be all garden – you have to fit in a car somewhere, maybe a garage eventually, a patio of some sort, and then the gardens.
My background as an interior designer helps me substantially, but nature makes a lot of the decisions for you: weather, sun, shade, direction, open, protected, and so on – the things you really don’t control and have yet to learn. There’s a huge learning curve to gardening, and you quickly realize that just because it looks amazing in someone else’s yard doesn’t mean it will do the same thing for you!
I had the good fortune of having both a mother-in-law with what we call ‘green arms’ and a wonderful neighbour, who, coming from a farm, grew things I didn’t know existed. Most gardeners are more than willing to give you a slip of something, tell you not only the types of plants they have, but where they came from and how much better they did last year! It took me years to understand what they meant.
So to start… The yard was a pile of gravel and weeds and one small blue spruce in the front yard. The street side opposite my house was all grass, with no houses yet built. Within a month, I planted a pyramidal cedar at the side of a window in front and dug out a garden for under the street-facing main window because that’s what most people did. I also cleaned out a planter built into the front porch for my first planting experiments.
With limited funds, I had to plan changes for improvements for each year, but our long winters gave me plenty of time to decide what the summer project would be. I looked at a lot of yards and wondered why most people put everything up against the house to be seen from the street. I understand the concept of curb appeal but it doesn’t do much for the homeowners who usually go out the back door and just look out the living room window into the front yard.
My first garden project was a little controversial. I had an L-shaped retaining wall, or fence, built near to the front of the property line so that when the garden went in it would face towards the house. I had to convince many to believe me that it would work. As with plans for a newly designed room, we have trouble sometimes imagining the vision of the finished space and how everything will look when it’s all done.
That bare fence looked pretty strange at the beginning – but I had a plan.
Posting date of next article in the series: December 2013
Garden location: Daryl’s home garden
Photo and Text: DD
Copyright: Daryl D
