Dirty Tales from The Garden III

A garden repossessed. That would be a good sub-title for this story.

In our early years we relied heavily on our friend Bernie and on Hubby's mother to get our garden restarted with cuttings and transplants. We were very fortunate - our trips to the local home improvement stores were frequent enough working on the inside of the house, but our garden center expenditures were relatively low.

But this was getting us little plants - flowers, ground covers and the like. We were looking at having to dig in our pockets to fill the gaps left when we pulled the old, woody and overgrown box hedges and holly bushes out from the front of the house.

Then M called. Fortune was not smiling on M, but was about to smile on us.

M's house was being repossessed by the bank. M had bought his parent's old house, and shared his late mother's love of gardening, so had kept up what she had started.

"Bring your shovels," he said. "The bank may get the house, but they're not getting Mom's garden."

So we came - and went - making many many trips to traverse the mile between our houses, filling the back of the van each time with tubs and buckets of plants, shrubs, trees, gardening supplies, mulch, and more.

We first took a big division from the huge hydrangea, until M found a bigger shovel and helped us wrestle the whole thing out of the ground. It went right into one of the holes recently vacated by a holly bush, and is now thriving again.

The lilacs were more problematic, having put down deep deep taproots (and the weather was dry, so the soil was rock hard). Two of those came, too, and are thriving.

We were able to get one of his Mom's roses out - but the rest were just too tight to the house and driveway and we did not want to kill them. The one is HUGE now.

And the rhubarb - but I will leave that to another post.