My dream garden is a half acre English cottage garden, surrounded by a white picket fence. There are bowers of roses and clematis, wide meandering beds of perennials. Big, billowing hydrangeas and spires of delphiniums and foxgloves surround the porch. There is a separate kitchen garden with four raised beds of tomatoes, squash, greenbeans and herbs of all kind and a fountain burbling right in the center. Chickens pecking in the dirt and the cat slumbering on a garden bench. The days would be sunny and the evenings cooled off by coastal breezes.
My reality is that I live on a good sized piece of property (five acres) about 30 miles north/east of Sacramento. The days are hot and the trees are tall and plentiful. Basically hot shade. The property is beautiful in its own right with a year round creek that comes through, four bridges (one covered, two suspension and one regular old bridge). The azaleas, rhododendrons and camelias do fabulously and I do have room for goats. Truly lovely. But not my dream garden. I want to be able to go out in the morning and cut armloads of flowers for vases in the house. I want be able to go out on a Saturday afternoon and weed and hand water. It’s too hot here to do that so my weeding is done either very early in the morning or later in evening (and it’s been known to stay up in the 80’s well into the night here).
So for now I mostly garden in pots on the deck and in smaller flower beds right up against the house. I’ve been able to eke out a little sunshine for my roses but I don’t have nearly as many as I want. I have to water my hydrangeas three times a day.
We do have a plan to get closer to the coast in the next year or two so my garden will have to bloom in my imagination for now.