"Grandma's Country Garden"

by Carolyn Singer, Foothill Cottage Gardens
Sierra Heritage, April 1999

Planning for changes stimulates my enthusiasm and commitment every year. A true gardener, I banish each disappointment quickly with those simple words: "There's always next year!"

When I started the project, a huge country lawn in front of the house was brown and uninviting in this last year of the drought of the late seventies. Seen through my eyes, it was a space to define at a later date, and I worked on revitalizing the vegetable garden first.

But seen through the eyes of my nine- and eleven-year-old sons, it was a football or frisbee field one day, and a croquet court the next. And always at night it was the perfect place to roll out sleeping bags with their new friends, a wide open view of the galaxies as the Sierra sky offers every clear night when the moon is not competing.

In the late 1800s, the Sonntag family settled on this knoll in Grass Valley at the base of Sonntag Hill. A three-story house was built where one of my perennial flower borders now provides glorious color in September with billows of asters. As the Sonntags and their ten children settled in, the surrounding land (1000 acres) soon sported English walnuts, zinfandel grapes, Bartlett pears, Arkansas Black apples, and even a cooler with a hops vine to shade it in the summer. As I learned from her granddaughter, grandma Sonntag was a gardener, content to putter on their land into her eighties.

But a garden thrives only as the gardener does. And when I arrived so many years after grandma Sonntag had last dug in the earth here, the strongest reminders of her presence were (and still are!) the immense English walnuts trees and the pears resilient enough to survive the decline that decimated the pear industry in Peardale and nearby Chicago Park.

Perhaps the lovely violets and hundreds of species daffodils (Narcissits thalia) were also part of this early garden history. They, too, are survivors. Later residents had planted a lilac, flowering quince and more trees near the house built after the original Sonntag home burned. A mix of ten-year-old conifers along the west side of the front yard was beginning to give privacy from the dirt road.

The old lawn, a mix of clovers and grasses, greened with the first rains. Respectful of the play field, at first I planted only a few shrubs near the house and front walk. Now years later, a sweet vanilla plant (Sarcococca ruscifolia) accents the entry with its evergreen beauty and intense fragrance in late winter. Nearby, a twenty-one-year-old Daphne is more beautiful with each passing year. In the years that followed I added more treasures.

With the addition of each ornamental shrub and small tree I imagined how its shape, texture, and color would affect the mature garden. Soon I was finding the perfect place for butterfly bush (Buddleia), Spiraeas, silverbells (Halesia carolina), star magnolia (Magnolia stellata), elderberry (Sambuctis), and Choisya ternata (Mexican orange), each defining space in the garden for future paths and private areas. The deer let me have them all.

My framework of trees and shrubs invited more design. Hardy perennials and groundcovers were needed to weave color around the perimeter. By the time those two boys were off to college, the front lawn was getting smaller. Garden beds were growing, some along the edges of the lawn, others islands of color where lawn was once open space, and some defining "garden rooms," now screened by mature shrubs.

Lamiums, violets, and hellebores brightened the shady areas, and benches were added to lure visitors to linger. One of the Sonntag's daughters sat with me in the garden, appreciative of my efforts. The last time she was in my garden she said simply, "I wish mother had been alive to see you do this." My connection to the garden and its history deepened.

Within a few years of my arrival I was teaching others about gardening. The more I shared the more I was inspired. Seeing my country garden through the eyes of students and visitors taught me valuable lessons of appreciation and acceptance. This was a garden for butterflies, for birds, for children. It had become, in spite of what I saw as imperfections, an inviting landscape, a perfect garden.

I became more attentive to the subtle rhythms of the garden. The soft light of a fall morning lingers across the golden leaves of the coral-bark maple (Acer palinatum 'Sango Kaku'). Later that same day I find myself sitting on the bench near the rock garden, watching the sun play through the feather grass (Stipa tenuissima) before disappearing behind Sonntag Hill. Winter brings rest for the garden and gardener. Seedpods, bark, and even the intricate shape of branches catch my attention. Finches, sparrows, towhees, juncos, and titmice gather at the feeders, adding a flurry of activity in an otherwise quiet season.

Year after year I have added to the Sonntag's efforts, committed to this special place, a country garden which will never be finished. One of the sons who played here was married on the same lawn where he threw the frisbee, now surrounded with flowering shrubs, more trees, and hundreds of perennials. His bride has loved the garden, gathering flowers and leaves to press, talking with me while we weed the vegetable garden. Now a few years later, a granddaughter runs across the lawn and down the paths, then quietly marvels at a treasure from grandma's garden, a simple leaf that no one else noticed and a black beetle hiding under it.