Found Objects

Yesterday I biked home in a gentle April shower. I was startled, suddenly, to see chartreuse: in the hours I was inside at work, ginkgo and honey locust unfurled eager leaflets from swollen buds. Magnolia and cherry petals carpet the road west, as if heralding Spring's triumphant arrival.

Red maple buds relish warm rays in front of a suddenly cerulean sky. Any day now, they will unfurl.

These magic days: before the leaves unfurl, I find myself paying attention to the structure and the objects in my gardens, before they are robed in springtime splendor.

Again and again I find, the things I love in the garden are things that look like they were always there. More often than not, theese are the found objects.

It all started in my West Philadelphia community garden, where detritus was a fact of life. The site of a former carriage factory, it was nothing but rubble: crumbling brick walls, chunks of concrete, shards of glass, bricks, stones, iron. We piled all the rubble in a heap, and eventually we made a pond atop it. In this corner we collect the bricks and stones and timbers from which we will make raised beds and paths.

Steve found an antique bench in someone's trash: he fabricated a new leg, sanded and painted it. It is now a favorite respite atop the Pond Hill. One day it will be shaded by a Paw Paw tree Ginny brought from her family homeplace, now just a seedling planted with love, on unforgiving terrain. Cast off grasses from the Estate provide a perch for birds after they shake their wings in our cooling waters.

My first year I had to prove myself to the other gardeners. They granted me a 4' X 4' foot "trial" plot. My own little urban Eden. I built raised beds of brick and rubble, and each subsequent season, was fortunate to have my acreage increase. I loved the way the sun shone off the many shades of found bricks, how I always found just enough old curbstones to complete a new bed, how early spring peas clamored over old rusty iron fence.

In a city where sometimes in especially soggy Junes, old abandoned houses will simply tumble down on themselves, there is never a shortage of raw material to scavenge. Old scrolled porch posts from a tumbledown ruin provide lascivious clematis a more than ample trellis over which to scamper.

A potager is an ornamental raised cottage vegetable garden, and my little patch of lettuce, in a raised bed of old bricks, rivals any flower garden for its ornamental appeal. A vintage rose, Fourth of July, leans on an old piece of iron gate that I carried from Kinnessing.

In front of a raised wall garden terraced by broken up old sidewalk pieces, an old teak bench,  destined for the garbage at an estate, in a shady corner of our garden, under a mulberry tree, is upholstered exquisitely in moss.

Cast off wheel barrows have earned their keep. Once their axles no longer can be repaired, I have designs on re-purposing them as planters.

Pond walls made up of old concrete chunks, will eventually be obscured by perimeter plantings. When I rebuilt the pond walls, I started with natural stone, but ran out. In this context, old concrete looks just about right. This garden is of the city, and from its old infrastructure, it takes its form.

At the Estate, the owners found this statue at a rummage sale. Most months it is a hidden treasure, a blue slate path wends through the woodland garden to it. The path's old slate pieces we squirreled away under an ancient yew, awaiting a purpose. Once this bluish gray statue arrived, they had found it. Only during azalea season does this statue's presence announce itself. Otherwise it is a secret shrine.

During these magic days, awaiting the canopy to unfurl, I take pleasure in the objects I encounter in the garden, remembering where they came from, and marveling how the right object, serendipitously found, looks like it has always been there.

These humble gleanings, moreso than expensive objects d'art, give the garden good bones. I am so glad for those few pleasant days in February or March, when the sun warms the soil, that I have the time to work some of these cast off treasures into structure that summer's bounty will eventually clothe.