I wanted to show you a few more pictures of my pond garden. This is a garden I’ve really struggled to get right. Rob and I built the pond in 2010, and I’ve been working on the surrounding garden ever since. The garden is contained …
Yesterday when I was watering plants, I spied something on a branch of one of my new camellias. At first I thought it was a clump of lichen fallen down from the treetops, a bit of debris. I leaned over to brush it away, but then I detected an eye . . . and a tiny arm . . . and a little “smile” . . . .
“Look,” I said to Rob in a whisper. “It’s not lichen. It’s a frog.”
“Oh, I see,” he said after a second.
I ran and got my camera and took some pictures, and then I did a little googling. Now I’m no expert, but I believe our frog was either an Eastern gray tree frog or a Cope’s gray tree frog (apparently you can’t tell these two species apart just by sight).
“I wonder if he was born in our pond,” I said to Rob.
“Maybe,” Rob said.
Who knows? There’s a pretty good possibility–because this summer the pond was teeming with tadpoles.
Gray tree frogs have rough, bumpy skin and can change from gray to green to brown to white depending on their surroundings, I read. They have big, sticky toe pads and are often seen clinging to windows and sliding glass doors. Though forests are their preferred habitat, they adapt well to farmland and the edges of cities and are often seen in yards (like mine).
It was neat to find a frog in my camellia. What I think is exciting and fun about gardening is that even if you weed and tidy quite a bit, the garden is never fully under your control. It’s brimming with secret residents and visitors and is a place of hidden doings. You hear strange rustlings in the leaves, find odd tracks left in the grass. There are always mysteries and surprises.
When my sister Kris and I were kids, we were big fort builders. We were always crouching in a fort under a tree. We built a great succession of forts, little lean-tos concocted without nails or screws. We’d usually stay in each place for about …
This weekend the weather was crisp and sparkly, as it has been around here for the last couple weeks. We’ve got quite a bit of fall color in the yard, which I’ve been trying my best to savor. …
In February 2010, Rob and I dug a pond in our yard. It’s about 12 feet long and 3 feet deep at the deepest end. Where the pond is now, there used to be nothing but invasive plants, a tangled thicket of nandina, ardisia, ligustrum, camphor, and wisteria. It was a wasteland.
The first thing we did was get rid of the invasives. That meant cutting them again and again, and mowing and weed-eating. Then we dug the pond and surrounded it with limestone rocks (the only kind of rock found naturally in Florida). We designed a huge bed around the pond and mulched it with newspaper and wood chips to kill the grass and low-growing, non-woody invasive weeds (bordergrass and old-world climbing fern). Then we filled the pond with water and goldfish and eelgrass and hornwort.
We built and painted a picket fence around the pond that summer, in 2010. We painted it dark black-green, like the fence that borders the front of our front yard. It took weeks to paint the many surfaces of that fence, and while we worked the goldfish had babies.
It wasn’t until November 2010 that I was able to plant the first plants around the pond. In Florida, planting season runs from November through February; the rest of the year it’s too hot to plant—or it’ll be getting too hot too soon. Inside the fence I planted Shi-Shi Gashira sasanquas, a leucothoe, sweetshrub, a Walter’s viburnum, a bluestem palmetto, coonties, needle palms, beautyberry, arrowwood, hearts-a-bustin’, and three Piedmont azaleas –and then I ran out of time. It was February 2011, a dry, hot, weird February.
2011 has been the driest year I can remember. All summer I was hand-watering, every day, trying to keep my plants alive. I was worrying, too, that this drought isn’t just an aberration, part of a natural fluctuation, but the beginning of a trend, the early days of a new reality–a hotter, drier Quincy.
Now it’s planting season again, but it still hasn’t started raining, so I’m planting—but cautiously. I’m concentrating my efforts in one area, just the pond garden, so I can keep everything watered. So far I’ve planted Christmas ferns, royal ferns, lady ferns, and southern wood ferns. I love ferns. A homeless man I once knew called them “fairies,” and I thought that was such a good name, because ferns are so ethereal, so magical.
On Saturday I was so happy just because I was free. For one precious day I didn’t have to go to work and I could do whatever I wanted. I added a sweetshrub (Calycanthus floridus) and three Elliott’s blueberries (Vaccinium elliottii) to our big bed around the pond, and Rob limbed up a lot of trees so …
