This piece first appeared in The Vermont Standard.
I had a row of new picture windows in my kitchen. They looked out on the backyard, over a long, narrow bank tangled with weeds and saplings. My husband Dick and I had let it go wild. But the longer I looked at it through my new, expansive windows, the less I liked the weeds that grew to two or three feet tall. So I began a three year project to make a wildflower garden.
Dick preferred the minimalist, keep-it-wild approach. “No,” I said. “If I’m going to be chopping onions and washing dishes, I want to be looking out over a riot of color—blues and yellows and reds in profusion.”
I’m not much of a gardener, but a few years ago, I took a notion to grow vegetables. I planted foods that I like to eat. I had to admit defeat after one season. I collected only fifty peas from a careful daily harvest. My corn stocks produced one scraggly, ugly ear, which I ate on principle. My leeks never got thicker than blades of grass and my carrots were smaller than my pinky finger. My only watermelon was still green inside when I finally cut it open. Even my tomatoes rotted before they ripened.
But a wildflower garden, I thought, that couldn’t be too hard. At first, I tried shortcuts. I bought some wildflower seeds and scattered them among the weeds. Eventually a few spots of Queen Anne’s lace and yellow daisies appeared. It was not nearly enough for me.
I took to the internet. A site for children’s projects recommended clay seed balls. I ordered up special seed bomb clay. I formed walnut-sized seed balls per the directions and tossed them on my bank. After many weeks the balls sat unchanged, with the seeds still firmly encased in clay.
I asked advice of gardening friends. Shortcuts wouldn’t work, they all told me: I would have to kill every weed, and then sow my wildflower seeds on bare soil.
My bank is 150 feet long and about 15 feet wide. Killing 2200 square feet of weeds seemed a daunting task. I donned my anti-tic uniform: long pants, knee socks over the pants, long sleeved, buttoned-up shirt, upturned collar, mesh face protector, hat, gloves. It all looked so comical that my smirk-faced husband snapped photos. I pulled out the saplings and biggest weeds, then chopped down the rest with a weed wacker.
The bank looked more manageable. I bought black landscaping fabric and some long metal staples. Covering up all the weeds was a hands-and-knees job. The staple prongs often hit rock. But after a few hours, the bank was shrouded in black.
I soon discovered that the channel formed between the bank and the back of my house acted as a wind tunnel. Almost daily, I was out re-securing sections of the black fabric. The staples could not stand up to the wind. The fabric ripped everywhere. I decided to cover the whole thing in heavy black plastic.
I held the substantial sheets I’d bought in place while Dick weighted them with logs from the wood pile. This entailed frequent, awkward slipping down the bank. “That should hold,” Dick said finally.
But one day, as I drove up the hill to my house, I noticed a huge plastic sheet in my neighbor’s driveway. “That looks familiar,” I muttered. I dragged the sheet back and weighted it down with even more wood. I scavenged the yard for heavy rocks. Nothing seemed heavy enough against the force of the wind, which somehow found every little open edge of plastic and lifted up the sheets. At night sometimes I could hear gales blow across the yard and I knew that in the morning I’d be out fighting the stiff wind and cold rain to retrieve and secure those sheets.
Even concrete blocks didn’t help. After weeks of frustrated trying to keep the bank covered, Dick came home with some huge bags of topsoil, and we placed the unopened bags strategically on the bank. That worked.
In my joy at longer having to wrestle with that plastic, I bragged to a gardening-wise friend. She told me that I should have roto-tilled and removed the weeds on the bank before I covered it. I sighed. “I am not pulling up those sheets and starting over,” I told my husband “we’ll get what we get.”
A year later, in the fall, it was time to uncover the bank. I’ve never been so excited about finding dead plant matter. I got out my little shovel intending to skim it all off. Again, though, the size of the task overwhelmed me. A friendly landscaper working next door agreed to come over with his smallish back hoe. It was a joy to watch him expose the bare dirt.
Finally it was time to sow. I stirred sand into the seed mixes I’d bought, then scattered it. Since I didn’t have a roller to press the seeds into the dirt, I took a big piece of cardboard and stomped on it, patch by patch, all over the bank.
Usually I love watching the birds, but they became an enemy as they swooped in and pecked at my seeds. I was happy when snow arrived.
By the end of May, little green seedlings poked up. A few weeks later, the bank was covered in white baby’s breath. Next the red poppies bloomed. Then I got hundreds of yellow-tipped, orange-centered coreopsis and dozens of feathery blue bachelor buttons. A visiting friend was delighted and took pictures to show his wife.
I made daily inspections to pull out weeds, even though I wasn’t sure which plants were nuisance and which were yet-to-bloom wildflowers. “They’re all technically weeds,” said my husband. I watered on hot days, even though my seed source said it wasn’t necessary.
I’ve had ten full weeks of beautiful blooms. They attracted bees and hummingbirds. I like to sit on the back porch, mellow out to the low buzzing, and watch the butterflies flit.
Now, at the end of August, the garden seems past peak. There are some brown-eyed susans and spots of painted daisies and crimson clover. I’m hoping that there will yet be more blooms; it looks like there are lupines that haven’t flowered yet. I’m planning for next year—maybe a nearby field of daisies or a lavender patch.