 |
||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
At the same time, we wanted to make our own garden, one that would link my New England past growing up on an orchard in Connecticut to Mary's Old England past on a farm in the Cotswold Hills near Chipping Campden. Today we garden an acre and a half that is comprised of a variety of areas linked by lawn and gravel paths: an enclosed herb garden; an outdoor dining area and shady rock garden; two woodland gardens that bloom in the spring; a pair of 90 foot long perennial borders with a post and beam gazebo at the end of the central lawn path, along with several other areas. Views lead out from every part of our garden to acres of hayfields that were wrested from the woodland over 200 years ago by Harold Ranney's ancestors. Sometimes we'll be sitting in the garden on a July evening while Harold is baling hay off those fields and we think about what a wonderful feeling of continuity we share with him. By honoring the past of the place, we have woven a kind of bond between us as newcomers and the Ranney family, both past and present.
|
|
Old tobacco shed in herb garden. Click for a larger view. |
In 1984, when we started cleaning up what had become a pretty neglected place, we found all sorts of things that helped us associate our new garden with this old farm. We unearthed 6' long granite fenceposts that we later used to frame entrances to garden areas. We found wheelbarrow loads of hard old bricks, two with mink paw prints in them, that Andre Bernier, our mason, discovered; he laid them into the hearth as he rebuilt the chimney and fireplace. We rebuilt tumbled down stone walls on the south and east boundaries between us and the ten acre meadow we subsequently purchased. We designed and installed a four-quadrant herb garden. It was based on the proportions of a 100 year old weathered 12'x18' tobacco drying shed that a local historian told us was probably moved over the ridge to the site from the flats down by the Connecticut River in Westminster where they did once grow tobacco commercially. In fact, he told us "that's the size building 19th Century kids could have moved up over that ridge with a team of oxen on a Sunday afternoon."
Even a gap in the wall that was once an entrance from the farmyard into the east meadow gave us an idea. Three years ago, I got on our riding lawn mower and created an 8 foot wide mown path from the lawn, through the gap and on out 100 yards or so to a mown circle around three oaks I had planted in the meadow. There is nothing more beautiful than to sit out there on a bench under those oaks in the hayfield, a field mown and baled two or three times a year by Harold or his son Philip, and watch the moon rise or the sun set, or to just look down the wooded valley toward Brattleboro. It's not hard to imagine Ranneys 150 years ago taking a break from haying and looking down that same valley from that same high spot in the meadow. Such a thought reminds us that we are temporary stewards of this land and so we need to do the right thing for those who follow us.
|
|
|
Click for a larger view. |
Another existing part of the old farm are the mature trees that grow on our acre and a half. The most important tree for me was a standard apple tree which needed a lot of pruning but reminded me of the orchard where I grew up. Every winter when I prune that tree I am reminded of when I was a boy. On winter afternoons, after I got home from school, I would go out into the orchards to help my father prune the last apple tree of the day.
When a butternut died, Nate and I cut the tree down but left an 8 foot high stump with its roots still in the ground. Mary, knowing about such things having grown up in England, contacted Gerry Prozzo, a neighbor and sculptor, to carve the face of the Green Man, a 5000 year old Druidic image of the meeting place between man and the world of plants, into the top of that 8 foot high trunk.
|
|
Click for a larger view. |
All kinds of artifacts also helped us link our new garden to the history of the place. We used three old milk cans from a dairy in Washington, Vermont that we bought at a tag sale to mark the entrance to what we call our Vermont Ruin Garden. Fifteen years ago, when we were clearing the northern end of the property, out behind the barn, we uncovered the cracked concrete floor where no more than six cows would have stood in their stanchions - such small herds were the rule back then. We filled the cracks in the concrete with sandy loam and compost and then planted drought tolerant ground- hugging perennials in that soil to create a tapestry on the gray concrete, all the time thinking about the cows and the people that had spent so very many years right there on that same surface but in such a very different way.
As we unearthed the concrete floor, we also discovered the old dry-laid stone barn foundations. Those walls lead us directly to a real treasure: the 18 foot diameter cracked concrete shallow bowl that we made into a watertight 18 inch deep pool. Years later I bought a 150 year old Danby marble wellhead from Cecil Buffam, a farmer in Rupert, Vermont and, with the help of a backhoe operator, set it atop four 12 inch high stones I had placed on the bottom of this little pool. I set a small pump under the central hole and now water runs up through the hole in that 4 foot diameter marble wheel, just as it had over in Rupert for the last 150 years.
