Garden Tour Coming April 18, 2010

Welcome to a garden in transition from many exotics to a haven for natives! The approach to the property, on one of the last unpaved stretches of road in Dekalb County, invites you to the peace of a country setting. The front fence, graced with oat grass, yucca, silver grass, and a serviceberry, protects from deer grazing. Rhododendron flank the drive to the house, anchored with hollies, boxwoods, and dwarf blueberries. Two Crimson Queens guard mossy, lichenized granite at the front door.

A granite outcrop community spills down the northwest slope from the house. The lichenized, moss-covered rocks stand elegant in winter and spring. They hide under a cloud of Stone Mountain daisies in summer and fall. On the north side of the house is a mesic area with maple-leaf viburnum, hydrangea, foam flower, geranium, pale Indian plantain, ginger, asters, fire pink, mosses, lichens, and ferns.

Off the northeast corner of the house is a small pond, home to bullfrogs, Cope’s grey tree frogs, green tree frogs, and Fowler’s toads, who provide concerts on spring and summer evenings. Like the frogs and toads, plants thriving in a riparian habitat came on their own—rushes, cattails, and hypericums.

Across the rear lawn is a meadow featuring columbine, sundrops, pink muhly, monarda, mullein, camphorweed, and asters, backed by oak leaf hydrangeas, hemlocks, beeches, oaks, cherries, sassafras, and hawthorns. In September-October, yellow clouds of Stone Mountain daisies engulf the meadow. Beyond the chaos of the meadow, a bridge leads across the creek to a wildflower slope—hepatica, green-and-gold, trillium, ginger, doll’s eyes, bloodroot, touch-me-nots, and ferns. Alders, sweetspires, and yellowroot hold the creek bank.

The vegetable garden is as real as it looks—15 foot rows on 6 foot centers, cared for organically with mulch, compost, and actively aerated compost tea to feed the microbes in the soil, who bring mineral ions and water molecules to the plant roots in exchange for sugars. The lawns are managed to give grass clippings that become a nitrogen source for composting. Like the veggies, the lawn grass is nourished by the microbes, who get cottonseed meal occasionally.