Re-inventing the Lost Garden

My woodland garden is not neat and tidy. There are no trimmed Box hedges, no orderly line of plants or symmetrical groupings. Plants are allowed to express themselves, to spill out of beds onto the paths, to party with their neighbors in wild exuberance.

One theory of gardening is that the gardener seeks to recreate the special garden of childhood. I freely espouse that theory, and my woodland garden is evidence in support of it.

I was lucky to spend my formative years on property that had been part of a hunting lodge estate on the Fox River. I'm dating myself here in noting that this was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before the area was completed developed and all trace of the garden destroyed. As most mothers at the time, my mom ordered us to "go out and play" when the weather was good. My siblings and I played elaborate games in the woods, by the pond, by the creek, by the river. Many of those games involved the plants we found growing in our "playground."

Before the property was first developed in the 1920s, it had been a Burr Oak savanna. Between the hunting lodge by the river and the big house with the ballroom someone had planted a wildflower garden. In addition to the exotics, both purple and white flowered Lilacs, Foxgloves, and Lily of the Valley, native wildflowers grew in abundance.the next-door neighbors' Lilac

We didn't know their botanical or common names, so my siblings and I called them Umbrella plants and Bee plants. Somehow, we knew the name of Jack in the Pulpit, Columbine and Dutchman's Breeches, but we never had a name for Caulophyllum thalictroides. And, of course, everyone knows what a Violet and a Fern are.

I am inescapably drawn to these plants and find I have to grow them. I've even planted a couple of Oaks. There were probably other wildflowers, but these are the ones that fill my memory. These are the ones special to me.

So my garden begins to resemble an overgrown, abandoned garden returning to a state of nature, to the chaos of the natural world. I can never completely recreate that lost idyll, nor would I want to. It is enough that fragments of memory are woven into the fabric of the garden. And then the wild child runs free again through the woods.