A Walk in the Garden

A Walk in the Garden

I am probably 75% done with our Cecil Memorial Garden. What started as a solo effort has become a team effort, which is always a better thing for a host of reasons. The team ends up being me, Kim and Handy Brad. We are doing what we each like most and are probably best at, which means we are probably optimizing the project in terms of quality, speed of execution and pleasure in the doing. We are all of an age that means we prefer to work in the morning and ease off in the afternoons. That plays to the weather cycle and, more importantly, the energy cycle (as in us having the energy to do more than sit and look at and ponder the garden). Kim is entirely focused on the memorial part of the garden and having a spot for her to remember Cecil each and every day. She has ordered a handmade plaque from Etsy, she has picked out a nice medium-sized piece of honey quartz that is more or less in the shape of the triangle where she will plant his ashes for eternity, she has pulled up all the existing succulents and weeds that were growing in that space, and she has designed what she wants there to be in that spot to memorialize him. We agreed on a memorial without a picture of him. She has many pictures of him and we agreed that this was more of a place of kind thoughts not necessarily one that needed visualization.

Kim went to pick up his ashes from the vet today. I offered, but she felt it was something she wanted to do. She also took them all his unused medications, which they said they give to people with pets in need that cannot otherwise afford medications. In this day and age of struggle with a pandemic and public health crisis while Americans lack universal healthcare coverage and what coverage exists under the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) is under constant threat of removal by the Trump Administration, it is understandable that not everyone has the wherewithal to pay medical costs for their pets. Kim feels she can do something to ease that problem by donating Cecil’s meds. I don’t know what sort of internment ceremony she will want, but she will have whatever makes her feel better about closing this difficult chapter for her. Talk of another dog is still a long way off, but will be entirely her choice to make. This is the small amount of support I can give to ease her suffering.

As for the garden itself, I have designed it, installed the fountain (which I have now hooked up with a WiFi App to turn off or on with ease), and laid out the key elements. There are three teak Asian style (meaning upturned at both ends) benches, there are half a dozen large ceramic planters with joyous and colorful flowering shrubs, there is a Terra-cotta Mexican-style cascading flower pot, there are two bamboo trellises with flowering trumpet vines, there are quail and dove feeders that are already in use by the birds, there are walking stepping stones (Terra-cotta with pebble finish), lots of beach pebble pea gravel and the piece de’ resistance, a boulder-backed rock-garden with nine bonsai trees interspersed among the rocks.

I have now become a bonsai guy. I am not yet a real bonsai master, since most of what I have done so far is buy bonsai and repot a few, but I am ready for the next step. I have set up in the garage, a bonsai station with a turntable, a leather pouch with bonsai tools and accoutrement like drainage screen material and wire for training the bonsai trunks. I have big bonsai plans and to motivate me I have started with this memorial bonsai viewing garden set amongst the rocks. I have a small maple forrest with 4/5 miniature maple trees. I have a small redwood forrest with three miniature redwood trees. I have a sculpted Chinese Elm, a windswept Rock Juniper, an Azalea, a Tea Tree, a Cork Bark Jade tree, a Mugo Pine and a Pyracantha “Firethorn” bush. It’s quite a collection and it is spaced out amongst the rocks in a manner than I have planned and attended to by adding strategic rocks and potting soil to keep the setting very natural looking and yet other-worldly.

So while I had largely finished laying out the garden by weeding the sparse, hard soil, raking up all the old bark chips and placing them around the seven citrus tree wells and putting down weed barrier by hammering in wire (galvanized and stainless steel) staples to make sure the weed barrier fabric stays down, I moved on to the higher art of bonsai. I was able to do that thanks to Handy Brad, who spent a career as a stone and tile guy and is thus very much at home laying sand and leveling stepping stones. He carried on with that and also carried in all the 75 pound bags of stone pea gravel that we had (we started with fifteen). He set perhaps half of the stepping stones and put down about 40% of the pea gravel. He also set the stones I have chosen to place around the tree wells. He went in mid-afternoon to the rock store for what we hope will be the last load of pea gravel and border stones and will finish up tomorrow.

Kim and I bought a load of plants and planters yesterday. It is amazing how much variability in plant pricing there is from chain nurseries to small Mamacita/Papacita nurseries. We found one of the later and got an SUV-ful of plants for a fraction of what we would have paid at the infamous Moon Nursery at the base of our hill. I planted some of them and watered all of them and the bonsai even though compared to the weekend of mid-90’s weather, today was just 80 degrees and quite reasonable. The garden is intended to NOT be a Xeriscape like the rest of our property. There are no succulents or cacti. Everything in the garden is intended to be lush and flowerfull and thus in regular need of water. We do not want this to be a garden on autopilot. We want to maintain it, water it, improve it over time, learn bonsai in it and sit and reflect about the world in it. We also want to think about what a lovely dog Cecil was and how lucky we were to have him in our lives for eleven years since his rescue.

Both Kim and I are big believers in the theory that we all have to count our blessings every day and rejoice in the good fortune of our lives, no matter what rain might fall on it at any given time. It is only through recognized and acknowledged appreciation of our blessings that we can find true happiness and contentment. That is the purpose of our garden and it is meant to remind us daily that life is a walk in the garden if you allow it to be.