Life Friendly Gardens: Feed Them Love, Not Chemicals

Summer is still splashing around in Watertown. Several of the gardens listed in the Life Friendly Garden Tour last weekend happened to be within walking distance of my digs on Oliver Street. It's inspiring to see how many ways there are to create a garden, large or small, with familiar or unique plants, sculptures, outdoor furniture, or even objects cast away by others, that results in an aesthetically pleasing, even whimsical, space.

Don’t expect to see bags of Scott’s Turf Builder or spray bottles of Round Up on this tour. The Life Friendly Gardens Tour in Watertown today was a showcase of how to garden without using toxic chemicals (see sign at left surrounded by big red finger plants called Amaranthus).

The mini landscapes surrounding several of the 14 houses on the tour within walking distance of my house were impressive. I’m good at growing grass, a few hardy shrubs, and two beds of pachysandra, which, as you know, require the maintenance skills of a sodbuster.

Knowing and accepting my limitations around anything requiring green thumbery is an asset. No longer do I view creative landscaping and plants that appear to be ready for a photo shoot for HG TV with malaise and a sense of insufficient imagination, an utter lack of what George H.W. Bush labeled “the vision thing.”

A walk through these gardens has the same effect on me as it does on their creators. Sort of an earth bound “Tranquility Base.” One gardener calls her space an "urban patch of solace" after a long day’s work. Another calls hers a “healing garden, healing first of all for me, the gardener, who finds infinite renewal in its ever changing beauty through the seasons.”

Entrance to Sharon Bauer's "Healing Garden" at 62 Pearl Street, Watertown (click Life Friendly Gardens Tour above).

Gardeners, like artists of any stripe, enjoy showing their work to fellow gardeners or oooh and ahhhhh types like myself. Cutting in flowerbeds, adding rocks, stones, and outdoor sculpture, tiny hand constructed pools complete with goldfish, and finding the right plants that will flourish in your environment requires patience. Some of the gardens on the tour have been in process for years.

These folks share tips and information. There are no proprietary secrets in this group. They’re eager to give ideas to the neophytes and share cuttings or little starter pots with anyone who asks.

They’ve got Farmer’s Almanac mentalities and plant flowers that will bloom from spring to late fall. Never a dull month in their gardens.

One enthusiast on the tour lived in a large two family house that had been neatly divided into four compact condo units. Where you and I might use their shared, untended, shady back yard as an excuse to pave the whole thing and make a bigger driveway, this gardener saw as an opportunity. Armed with abundant enthusiasm and a vision of Versailles, she got the agreement of the other three owners to have at the bedraggled plot.

 The result is a shade garden (left) chock full of several kinds of hosta and shade loving flowers plus funky, colorful little garden sculptures plonked around the shady stuff - “an urban perennial shade garden,” she says.

The son of one homeowner made a small rock lined pool and filled it with koi (goldfish) and comets and topped it with lilies that Monet would have loved.

The same gardener, Sharon Bauer, printed a pamphlet for visitors. “Wild flowers flourish around the edges, providing food for humans and animals.  Milkweed attracts Monarch butterflies. Goldfinches flock to evening primrose seeds, mockingbirds to pokeweed berries. The pin cherry tree next to our driveway volunteered from a seed dropped by a bird, and now catbirds enjoy a feeding frenzy when the cherries are ripe. Bees love goldenrod.  Plantain heals bee stings. Motherwort, yarrow, red clover, nettle, chickweed, lady’s thumb and many other 'weeds' provide good medicine.”

Henry David Thoreau, legendary naturalist who lived in nearby Concord, MA, would have been right at home in this intersection of random acts of nature and conscious acts of gardener. Maybe this is what he was thinking about when he said,"Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads."

Homeowners like pt at large are shocked, perhaps enlightened, that many so-called 'weeds' can be part of a colorful little ecosystem in the same company with impatiens, nasturtiums, black-eyed susans and day lilies. All a true gardener needs is space.

Vines bearing Mucat grapes cover back porch

The Chemical Use Reduction and Education Task Force (CURE) that sponsored the tour is a project of the Watertown Citizens For Environmental Safety (WCES), which is committed to educating the public about the dangers and safe alternative solutions to chemical use in the house and garden.

Today was a tour de force that showed beauteous gardens can be created without the aid of pesticides. Imagination, patience, and a good work ethic will do it just fine.

Photos by Paul Tamburello

Comments

[Barbara Widett]

Thanks PT - as you might remember, I'm an avid gardener and enjoyed this article. Thanks for the tip about WCES - I have a few questions they may be able to help me with. Hope all is well. Hugs, the other half of that wonderful team at Pierce,

[pt at large]

Hi Barbara, Two contacts listed on their site are Henrietta Light at 617-926-2545 and Laura Cherry cherrylaura@hotmail.com. Another Life-Friendly gardener in my neighborhood might help if you cant contact these two. Good luck!
Paul

[Svenska]

PT,
 I saw the signs for this at several homes around Watertown but was uninformed of what it was about. I must thank you for keeping me in the loop.

[Carolyn]

Paul
I love the photos of my garden. I've sent it to all the friends that weren't able to make it.

[Sharon]

Paul, this is wonderful! I wouldn't change a word. Thank you so much for doing this, thereby taking the Life-friendly garden tour to many more people than were able to visit in person. I am thrilled to be included. What a good writer you are -- I had no idea you were a blogger.

[Sharon]

Not everyone notices the "verdant little aperture" in the front bushes -- you have a discerning eye!

[Cathleen]

Hi Paul,
Thanks for this info. I went to the website, and it was wonderful to read about the different gardens.