Everyone’s outdoor spaces are getting a lot more use this year. With the continuing concerns about the pandemic, most of us are staying closer to home. And we learned pretty quickly that four walls can get claustrophobic.
Those of us lucky enough to have any kind of a yard are extending our living area to include it. When and if we socialize, outdoors is the preferred place. And even if we’re alone, getting outside, in the sun or under the stars, makes this crazy time feel just a little more sane.
I live in the country in Delaware County. My neighbors are cows. MK Burnell, my daughter, lives in a neighborhood of little brick cottages near the Rondout. My yard is big. Hers is not. But we’ve both spent a lot of time making outdoor living areas this year. She didn’t think she had inherited the gardening bug that afflicts me.
She was, it turns out, wrong.
“My house is very small, inside and out,” MK said when I proposed we both talk about what we’ve done and why we did it. “And there was zero privacy outside when we moved here.”
What we started with
MK and her partner, DJ Scully, wanted to make the most of what they had. They have two dogs, and the dream, she said, was to have a fenced yard.
“When we had a house-warming party after we moved in,” she remembered, “it was winter and we used the yard. We had a fire in the firepit that was here. But it was a weird, lumpy wasteland, and it felt really exposed to the houses on either side.”
Scully finished erecting a high-privacy fence around the entire back yard this spring, and MK pulled out the weeds, planted a fruit tree, created a vegetable garden, and started flowers. They improved the fire pit, set up some chairs, and now have a more secluded, functional space that they feel is an extension of the house.
“I’ve never been super-crafty,” MK said. “There’s kind of a new joy I’m discovering as a homeowner. I sit on the back step of the house a lot, just looking at the back yard. I’m thinking some lighting, making use of the vertical space, maybe some flower boxes on the fence. The more you do, the more you’re motivated to do.”
I’ve had the same experience at my old farmhouse in Franklin in Delaware County. The prior owners put in a small vegetable garden, and I’ve tripled it. I’ve turned the meadow into a maze/meditation walk…a very impressive description for paths that I mostly enjoy from the vantage of a second-story window. It’s good for wildlife, and it’s easy to mow, too.
My happiest achievement is a shade garden between the house and the garage. Before, it was a square-ish lawn with a flowering crabapple in its center. I mowed it and I looked at the foundation of the garage and I felt – nothing. The patio is nearby, and we saw it every time we go outside. It was, in a word, blah. But it never occurred to me to do anything with it. It was, after all, completely shaded.
Making a big difference
There is an accomplished local gardener in our town who has the most gorgeous gardens at her village home. One garden is very formal; all right angles and corners. The other is lush and curving, and hides from the street behind a high hedge.
She came to visit shortly after we moved in, and I asked her advice. She pointed at that shady bit of lawn.
“There. Start small. Put a garden there. It’s going to make a huge difference. You’ll see.”
I spent the winter imagining what I’d do. I sketched and I researched shade-loving flowers. Then Covid arrived. I knew it was unlikely there’d be a budget for a new garden.
But one day someone I knew put a note on Facebook saying she’d dug up “a hundred” hostas, and they were free to anyone she knew who wanted to take some.
I put on my mask, threw plastic in the back of my car, and loaded up. I took at least 30.
My plan was out the window, but I had a carload of shade-loving plants, so I tried to lay them out in a semblance of my original idea, and moved some lilies of the valley from the flower-choked embankment behind the kitchen. The lilies and some hostas circled the crabapple, and the other hostas lined the garage foundation and crept out into a freeform garden area that split that simple square into more interesting paths and shapes.
When we had to take down an old maple tree early this summer, I suddenly had all the wood chips I needed to make those hostas look like they not only belonged, but like they were meant to be there.
My garden-loving friend was right. That haphazard garden has brought me more joy this summer than I could have possibly predicted. We’ve added some annuals, some grasses, some low-growing plants with interesting foliage. I even hung a basket of yellow begonias from a branch of the crabapple.
That garden is now, at least in my opinion, one of the prettiest spots on our very pretty property.
I have set up a dining table near that garden. I have a porch swing which can overlook either that garden, or be turned to observe the sky above the meadow behind us. I have two rocking chairs outside, and we sit out there at every chance we get, looking past the hanging flower baskets on the porch toward the shade garden.
My daughter said she finds herself staring at her yard a lot, too.
“When you work hard at something, you enjoy looking at it,” she said.
We’re both already planning for how we can enjoy our outdoor spaces once summer is over. Neither of us thinks we’ll be getting out a lot, and the signs seem to point to a real possibility that we may be headed back to a partial shutdown. We’re certain, either way, that it’s going to be smart to stay close to home for a while longer.
MK maintains that even into the fall the fire pit is still something she’ll use. “I can throw on a coat, and once the fire’s going, it’s pretty comfortable, even in winter.”
At my place, I have decided there’s a spot near the lilac bush that could be perfect for a small hot tub.
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