Home in the mountains

It was a whirlwind weekend of moving up furniture and boxes last Friday, shedding furniture at local consignment shops,  sorting boxes to the right spaces, unloading and distributing them, shedding even more, etc.

But it was good work. It didn't take as long to get things back into a semblance of home as it did to shed things.

And it wasn't so difficult to honor the old house that we were leaving, after all.

It's a good house, with great bones, and it looked nice even though empty, waiting for the next owners, whose truck was in the driveway.

I'm grateful for the encouragement (and discipline that was imposed by a smaller house) around shedding.

We've done well. We have space for everything, although I'm still in reorganization and shedding mode (and will be for a while!)

Our favorite pieces of furniture from our old house came with us.

Our old sofa has replaced the main sofa (an overstuffed, tufted sofa filled with feathers, which I hated for reasons from tufts to allergies).  The sleeper sofa has given way to the matching loveseat to the upstairs sofa.

And starting to rearranging things and get everything settled (all the boxes are gone, now, hooray)  will be an ongoing process, but it's finished enough, now, to feel even more at home.

Our more rustic antique pieces have simply made us feel more at home;  I still have too many "decorative" items, but as  I pare them down, we'll still be at home.

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Bloodroot in flower

Coming back to the Piedmont today, I was delighted to see bloodroot in full flower.  I've made so many posts about bloodroot -- it's a favorite early spring flower.  Here's a post from last year.

We planted it in various places around the garden, starting with one plant. Ants have spread the seeds and patches have popped up all over the front woodland border along the front path.  Totally rewarding.

There are a number of large clumps now in the front, along with smaller plants.  Lovely.

It's in flower in the South Carolina Botanical Garden, too. I took this photo late this afternoon.

Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis)

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Creating a natural garden

As my gardening companion and I prepare to leave a garden (really a low-maintenance native plant-dominated landscape) that we've created over the last 22 years, it's interesting to reflect on the changes that we've made -- all to the good, certainly, from the perspective of being good stewards of our space in the world.

We've converted 1.44 acres of what was largely lawn, punctuated by a few large hardwood trees (oaks and hickories), to a native-plant rich diverse landscape,

devoted to woodland in front

with the side yard screened by a diversity of shrubs and trees, not all native, so including Deodar cedar, gingko, and Asian viburnums.

The theme was adding plants that work for a living - native plants that Tim could use for Plant Ecology and Field Botany labs, and adding plants that supported pollinators, herbivores, and providing habitats for birds, and other wildlife.

The front meadow and informal perennial borders have been about supporting pollinators.

And the vegetable garden spaces have been about nourishing us, and our table.

It's been a privilege to be a steward of our historic house (built in 1929), but even more importantly, I'm glad to be leaving a more nature-vibrant landscape, too.

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More pocket meadows

I'm been on the lookout for informal plantings of native grasses and forbs (herbaceous perennials) --- these are the pocket meadow plants and plantings that I'm wanting to promote in an upcoming talk. 

More expansive meadows (at least in the eastern U.S.) are hard to manage, as they want to become woodlands and forests (natural succession at work).

But smaller 'pocket meadows' -- more like informal native perennial borders-- are a lot more satisfying, promoting pollinator visits as well as providing habitat for seed-eating birds like goldfinches, in the fall.

Here are some wonderful examples in the parking lot for the Botanical Gardens of Asheville and the adjacent greenway plantings along Weaver Blvd. (in Asheville, N.C.)

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