Rain, rain, rain! Will it ever stop? Gray skies, heavy fog, a constant wet drizzle. If by some miracle I wake up to sunshine, by noon the clouds have blocked it out and another gentle rain is making its tattoo on the roof. Right now there is a steady downpour outside my window. Maybe if I write about all this rotten weather Mother Nature will be kind and put a stop to it.
I guess we should be thankful we're not having floods and serious power outages like other parts of the country. There's been nothing very dramatic about these weeks of soggy rains. Remember that torrential downpour in September 1977? Our corner of Connecticut got 5 inches of rain in one hour, washing out five bridges. That storm tore out the dam of our pond as well, and cut a 20 foot deep gully down through the pasture. We found our little rowboat, or parts of it, down on Route #44 the next day. Eventually we filled in the gully with what remained of the collapsed cow barn, an eyesore we'd been wanting to get rid of for years.
This year the rains have done little harm to the pond, merely drowned its edges. The spillway has fortunately been handling the overflow. Today's photograph won't mean much if you're unfamiliar with the pond on Locust Hill, but all those shrubs around the edge are normally on high ground. I don't mind having an overflowing pond; in fact it looks very handsome. What I don't like is what all that excess water does to my perennial border.
The water races down from the sheep pasture in such quantities that the pipe under the lawn can't cope with it Sticks and twigs and old leaves get caught in the pipe, the water becomes a frothing waterfall in back of the fence that pelts down on the hapless plants, sweeping soil, perennials and even uprooted bulbs across the lawn and into the pond.
How I long to replace the split-rail fence with something a little more substantial like a beautiful stone wall. And not just to protect the border from being swept away. A well-built stone wall gives a sense of permanence to a garden, and a border like the one on Locust Hill would be greatly improved with a good background. Most gardens look better with something solid backing them up the same way most choral groups sound better with accompaniment. An acappella chorus can sound pretty wobbly if a few singers go flat, but supported by background music they'll do fine. Flowers are the same way. They may not go flat, but if given a proper background they'll look and perform twice as well.
A stone wall, a thick screen of evergreens or a board fence all make good backgrounds, but a split-rail fence can hardly be classified as a background at all since you can see right through it. It offers no protection from wind, water or weeds. In my case, such noxious invaders as quack grass, bedstraw and wire grass don't even have to sneak in the back way. The door's wide open. Every year I spend hours uprooting these pasture horrors that have settled happily in the comfort of the nice friable topsoil of the flower bed during the previous summer.
I've tried many defences (pun intended) against these invaders, but none have worked. Laying boards on the ground beneath the fence was a positive joke. So was pouring a thick layer of pebbles at the back of the garden. Digging in asbestos shingles as a barrier took so long to do that even though it kept the pasture's grasses at bay for several summers, I was never tempted to do it again. Using the weed-eater at the back of the fence just encouraged the grass to grow back twice as strong.
A board fence, unlike a post and rail, can discourage grass, forcing it to at least crawl under instead of just marching right into the flower bed as if it owned the place. Evergreens discourage grass and weeds by depriving them of sunshine and making the soil too acid for their liking. Ah, but a stone wall really eliminates the possibility of a grass attack from the rear. It also provides a background that is attractive in both color and texture. It is solid enough to offer protection against strong winds, and in my case, rivers of water.
I can picture how handsome my border would look with such a background. There happens to be one big problem - paying to have one built. My old man did a lot of stone work when we first moved to Locust Hill, laying terraces and building stone walls, but sad to say, those days are long gone. Last year when we realized that the retaining wall of railroad ties he'd built back in 1980 was collapsing, we bit the bullet and hired someone to replace it with the magnificent stone wall pictured in the column I wrote back in August.
A wall that handsome costs a pretty penny, so I doubt very much if I'll ever decide to replace the split-rail fence behind the border with an equally gorgeous one. Oh, well, half the fun of gardening is dreaming, right?.
