Evoking summer

I’m sick of shivering and looking at snow. I’ve had enough of winter; I want summer.

But winter is not all bad; if nothing else, it forces us to face up to all the indoor stuff we’ve been neglecting. Tonight I began to look over images from 2009 to see which if any deserve to be loaded up to the web site. But soon I was wandering and found the images above. The pond scene is from June of 2004. The image foreshortens the distance between the lythrum and the Japanese irises: it’s actually about twenty feet tip to tip.

What the picture does not convey is any sense of the heat and humidity we typically experience when these irises are blooming. And the picture can be enjoyed without the bother of mosquito bites. So winter does have its advantages, doesn’t it?

While I'm at it, here's another view from early summer. This view carries the eye down under the pergola to glimpse the path at the lower end of the garden. This axis is also easily enjoyed from my favorite seat in the fireplace room.

Season's Greetings Everyone!

A forty-foot pergola divides the garden into two unequal parts. The near side of the pergola forms the wall of the pool garden. In the center of this side of the pergola is an oculus, an eye-shaped opening which allows a view along the garden's main long axis. Here you see the oculus in its holiday season dress.

Aeolian Woes

Last weekend I toured the garden checking for things to do before the ground freezes. The pergola caught my eye, and it occurred to me that the hurricane season had passed for this year without any wind problems. My forty foot pergola is built on the gravity principle: gravity is the only force holding it together. The strong wind yesterday revealed once again the limitations of that system. Today, all of the long runners and cross beams of the pergola are on the ground, blown down one by one in yesterday’s winds. The pergola piers themselves are still upright and wreathed in the collapsed tangle of climbing roses. This happened once before as the tail end of a hurricane passed through. I’ll be working alone as I attempt to put everything right, and past experience has shown me that it’s rough, painful work. As all real gardeners know, gardening is a blood sport. I’ve got enough to keep me busy for the next few weeks without the pergola problem, so the roses might very well spend the winter on the ground. If so, I’ll have to get them up before the buds for vegetative growth start to swell: once that happens, they will be too fragile to successfully withstand the rough work involved in pushing the canes back into position.

Life under a pergola

When I redesigned my garden about fifteen years ago, I took the bold step of installing a pergola across the main longitudinal axis of the garden. The garden is sixty feet wide, and the pergola is forty feet long. In crossing the main axis, the pergola divides the garden into a section of approximately one third of the garden’s area and another of approximately two-thirds of the garden’s area. The smaller area is the one nearer the house and forms what I call the pool garden.

The pergola now supports large plants of several climbing roses which during rose time produce a roiling, fragrant foam of white which covers the pergola. When the atmospheric conditions are right, the garden fills with the scent of roses.

The pergola fulfils several functions. Its main purpose was to be a support for the climbing roses I wanted. Its placement gives it a major role in shaping the garden. It also serves as a path from one side of the garden to the other. Once the roses had grown up into place, something else became apparent. The area under the pergola is a garden room of its own, the most conventionally defined such space in the garden. At night, when the space under the pergola (the interior of this garden room) is softly illuminated by candlelight or even with the reflected glow of a spotlight, there is a sense of enclosure which is uniquely satisfying. This is produced by an effect comparable to that produced by a scrim in the theater: the light reflecting on the leaves of the vines which clothe the sides of the pergola produces the illusion of walls defining the space. The rest of the garden disappears, and the viewer is left with the impression of being in a comfortably big, green-walled hallway or room. It’s an enchanting effect. The sense of seclusion this produces is wonderful. It's a favorite place for reading at night, even on mild winter nights.

For more views of the pergola see: http://www.jimmckenney.com/pergola_photo_gallery.htm