Treasures In a Wild Garden

An overview, with a wheat field behind

Even the weeds can be beautiful!

More beauty weeds

Ever hear of a wild garden?  I hadn’t either until we moved to Germany.  Every garden I’d ever seen, behind someone’s home, or in professionally done landscape, all had a carefully cultured look.  Flowers placed just so.  Plenty of rich tilled soil between the plants.  Weeds banished; the palate of the garden a broad stretch of lawn, so manicured it appears to have been measured, then trimmed with scissors by an anal-retentive barber.

But, what if you can’t find an out of work anal-retentive barber?  These days you may have better luck.  Most barbers I’ve had the misfortune to meet lately were electricians the day before, and ‘factory trained’ mechanics the week before that.  Wanna see the scars on my misshapen pate?

Why do you keep diverting my attention?  Let’s get back to gardening.  While I appreciate the care and effort of the traditional hedgerow flower garden, I don’t like to cut the lawn and now that the sons are grown, I no longer have to set up plastic water slides, soccer goals, or badminton nets.   But…..and this is a biggie….I know first hand you can still pass a football around a wild garden.

How do you get from a conventional to a wild garden?  Like anything worthwhile, it takes time, experimentation and work.  I can mention all the common advice.  Read. Ask advice from experts at your garden center.  Go to gardening blogs.  Without too much trouble you’ll find the basics for a layout and for plants, but it’s not like laying down turf.  Some plants thrive in one spot or another.  Often it’s tough to imagine how big or how small the varieties are that you’re planting.  Also, don’t think for a moment that a wild garden means no maintenance.  Some flowers thrive, others die and leave bare spots that are soon filled with obnoxious weeds.   You’ll also find that not all weeds are obnoxious.  Some are delightful wild flowers, such as poppies and Queen Anne’s Lace. 

From the photos, you’ll see a mix of blowing grasses and large pockets of color.  It’s fine to spread the color around, but for my money, you need to have large bursts of a single color as anchors.

You may also want to be careful about which kinds of high grasses you plant and where you plant them.  Some non-native species sink deep, deep roots and once they take hold, you’ll never get rid of them.  Other species, such as bamboo, send out runners that will quickly overtake entire portions of your garden.

But, in the end, a wild garden is much more than a garden.  It’s also a haven for birds, and small animals.  Even the occasional rabbit, or pheasant may make it their home.

There are other reasons a wild garden is more to my liking these days.  First of all, it’s a living piece of art, a canvas that changes with the seasons, never returning to exactly as it was.  Every year, as the dark, bare skeletons of winter’s trees take on their spring greenery, and flowers go from brown stalks of yesteryear to promises of beauty, and bees begin their never ending flights to my garden and home, the wild garden marks the new birth of my world.

I sit outside and see the daily changes.  Purple flowers here, waving grasses there, buds of yellow, once again burst though the long winter’s blanket of grays and blacks.

A wild garden is not for everyone. Some folks cannot get past the work they’ve put into a perfect lawn.  Others dwell on the open spaces with the echoes of their children’s voices and the promise of their grand children’s voices to come.  Believe me, I understand.

But, when we moved to Germany, so many memories did not get packed with our furniture and such.  The lawns of yesterday are smiling ghosts of the past that only live in a father’s heart.  Perhaps those ghosts would not permit a new lawn, with small voices that will never come.

Now I need to feel as one with nature, to share the sun, to watch the children of the flowers grow and blossom.  Perhaps it soothes the soul, and keeps alive other seasons in my life.  The lawns are gone, but the voices still ring.  And after all, beauty remains.

Lacy, flowing tops of some tall grasses

Different shades of green and waving grasses.