After a decade: more before and after

I written about my husband John's rock garden before. This link tells the story of how it came to be.

Pretty gorgeous, but before that...
The pictures below show its progression from a mere rock pile rescued from the bulldozer. The rock used to be part of the foundation of a barn, long gone by the time we bought our property. The construction from beginning to end took John two years, working weekends and holidays in the summer.

What have I got myself into?
Cutting and shaping the stone

Adding the gravel and soil mix

Planting weekend - almost every single plant grown from seed
How the garden looked last month
© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener

Before and After: Marking 10 years here

A decade ago - before the makeover
Ten years ago today we moved here to a very unkempt 10 acres with no gardens to speak of. A silo marked the location where a barn used to be. Foundation rocks and rusted metal bits were strewn at its foot and hidden by tall grass and thistles.

These pictures show before and after scenes of just that one area, which we now call the orchard because of the crab apple trees we planted there.

I remember well sowing the grass seed with a broadcast spreader meant for fertilizer. It was in the fall after the bulldozer man had done his work. Like so many of the seasons over the past decade, it was a drought year, and the seed didn't germinate until it finally rained in December. Then the snow came. I despaired about ever seeing the grass come up.

Earlier this spring before the crabapple bloom
Last week, with the trees in their full glory
It's really gratifying to see the lawn I planted flourishing and those crab apple trees getting more lovely by the year. They were just four or five-feet tall and bare root when we planted them.

These days I marvel at the energy and imagination we had to create a garden like this. (We were kind of crazy in our enthusiasm. Our energy certainly isn't what it was 10 years ago.) Oh, the irony: the trees are getting more handsome as they age. But my husband and I? Well, we just look 10 years older. But, as my 80-year-old mother would say: Oh, stop it. You're still young.

© Yvonne Cunnington, Country Gardener