Last summer, during the pandemic, I built four raised beds for vegetables.  The beds are great, but my gardening expertise, not so much.  We do better with flowers.

We also put in a raspberry bed and fenced it.  The tall canes that our friend Lori gave us bloomed continuously and gave us berries into November.  The kale is still growing, too, and the strawberries are going strong.

The truth is our entire property is a kind of garden.  It’s wild and unkempt, by most standards, but to us every area has its own unique magic:  the roses up by the road, the tall madronas and alders, the Himalayan blackberries cascading over the neighbor’s fence, the peach and pear trees, the labyrinth I put in last spring, the apple trees along the driveway, the pummeling plum tree (a Mirabelle plum), which shields our little pop-up trailer that we got a year ago, so that it’s invisible from the road.  The trailer is tucked away for winter, but in summer it’s my tiny writing retreat.  There’s a trail from there under the shade of madrona and fir, through the salal and salmonberries and the wild cherry trees. The trail leads to the rockery, where stone steps and a hazelnut-beam railing lead down into the back yard, which is lush now with new grass.  The yard is bordered by cedars along the north side, rhododendrons, tulips, irises, and daffodils, and tall Douglas firs where the eagles perch above the house, more apple, pear, and cherry trees near the house, and a Daphne odora which is budding now.  A jumble of hazelnut trees behind the raised beds on the north side of the house lean across the yard, and on the south side the dogwood, azaleas, quince and camellia grown in the shade of the neighbor’s towering deodar cedar, with its huge limbs and which I worry about during the winter windstorms.  In front, overlooking the harbor is a long row of peonies at the top of the bank, with rosemary and daffodils, and below the peonies are rows of lavender bushes which entice the bees all summer long.

There’s so much to keep up with, and much of it is wild, like the wild roses I keep trying to train up onto a trellis, and the bluebells that spring up in May, the wild sweet peas that erupt in profusion over the entry area near the house, the carpet of orange crocosmia and the copious foxgloves that spring up all over the southwest side of the yard every summer along with the Oregon grape and the sprawling wild blackberry vines and the detested English ivy which is the one thing I constantly keep hacking away at.

Every corner of the property has its challenges and its unique beauty.  When we took out the towering junk cherry trees along the back yard, sadly we also destroyed the climbing pale yellow roses that bloomed overhead in their branches, but the tree branches leaned over the fire pit and when we took the trees down we saw charred spots on some of the branches.  How lucky we were!  How lucky we ARE!  I do not take a bit of this for granted.  We live in a paradise—and I haven’t even mentioned the pink climbing roses along the driveway, and the new fence we gave them to grow on.  One year when my husband was first here he went out to trim the blackberries and clipped off several of these beautiful rose branches.  It was a bad day for him, and I watch him like a hawk now whenever he goes out with the clippers.

Speaking of hawks, we have those, too.  A Cooper’s hawk, I think, sometimes flies through, or a sharp-shinned hawk.  Our garden home is also home to chickadees, the rufous-sided ones mostly, and towhees, Oregon juncos, and nuthatches, Northern flickers, Stellar jays, robins and white crowned sparrows, song sparrows, ruby-crowned kinglets, Pacific flycatchers, cedar waxwings, goldfinches, house finches, wrens, and hummingbirds.  It’s also home to chipmunks, squirrels, raccoons, otters and deer.

The tiny cabin my grandparents built here in the 1930’s is on a medium-high bank above the harbor.  The beach consists of rocks and granite boulders from the ice age, and logs brought in from the tide.  The beach: gray rocks crusted with barnacles, clam beds, sand dollars, moon snails, mussels and starfish.  There are transitory loons on the harbor in the spring and autumn, and a combination of other migratory and year round residents including ospreys, cormorants, grebes, buffleheads, golden-eyes, surf scoters, mallards, gulls, mergansers, and Canada geese.  There are kingfishers, crows, and ravens, the tall blue herons and the savage bald eagles which prey on everything and decimate the heron rookeries.  There are harbor seals which follow our canoe on quiet evenings, or pop up a few yards away from us while we’re swimming, much to the horror of my friend, Kate.

On summer nights with the windows open, the quiet lap of the water rolling onto the rocky beach lulls me to sleep.  The waves are less comforting during winter storms, or when they are the result of passing boats:  the racing shells leave silver streaks of light along the harbor, but the noisy hydroplanes, the fishing and motorboats and sailboats which take over in the warmer months make this seem less of a paradise than a noisy parade of people, who litter the water with their plastic bottles and snack containers.  But most of the year it’s wet and quiet, and nature thrives here.

The Italian plum tree that my grandmother planted has numerous offspring growing in a thicket near the road, but her old sweet tree still grows outside our kitchen window and holds the suet feeder currently being raided by the squirrels and the flickers.  At night we hear the hoot of the barred owl, and in February, we hear the chorus of frogs from the meadow pond up the road.