Garden Journal: Valentine's Day 2/14/20, a spectacular sunny day after so much rain. 55º
-Moved rocks from my parents house that is for sale to areas of my garden experiencing erosion.
I started my first garden when I was about 12 or 13 in my parents back yard and one of the first parts of the garden was a rockery. My now late neighbor, Mrs. Evelyn Jones who I adored was often at work in her yard and I would always visit as she gardened. She had created a large stone bank between our two yards and we I began my rock garden she told me I could dig up as many as I wanted. I planted the rock bank with a few hundred bulbs that put on a big show every spring including all types of narcissus, crocus and muscari.
Fast forward three decades and now I'm building my dream garden. My parents have moved and my childhood home is for sale. My new garden, newly planted experienced some bad erosion in our record rains so some rock were needed to slow the movement of water over my beds. I had a thought, how nice it would be to bring a few items from the garden of my youth before it is gone forever.
Today, I went to my childhood home and no one was there. I pulled my truck up to the garden where I have not gardened for over 20 years and began to pull some of my rocks from my rock garden now overgrown with ivy. It was both sad and fulfilling and a tad surreal. I can tell you my 14 year-old-self must have been much stronger than I am now as lifting some of those small boulders was hard!
Then, back to my new home and garden and how sweet it was to have my youngest child, a precious kindergartener, help me move these stones into place in our new home. I hope our new home will be a place that he will remember as the place of his childhood. With these stones we will fashion a new small rock garden of succulents come late spring.
All of this made me think of the Bible story from Joshua, where stones were used to commemorate the crossing of the Jordan by the Israelites.
Joshua 4:6-7 “that this may be a sign among you when your children ask in time to come, saying, ‘What do these stones mean to you?’ Then you shall answer them that the waters of the Jordan were cut off before the ark of the covenant of the LORD; when it crossed over the Jordan, the waters of the Jordan were cut off. And these stones shall be for a memorial to the children of Israel forever.”
This might sound grand but the Lord uses the small for gestures of grandeur and so in someway the soil and Earth of my past garden are now woven into the future of the new with a promise of new life for me.