I Made A Garden On The West Side Of Buffalo

I’m honestly not sure, but I believe I bought my house in 2013. I try to locate this in time moving backwards in my recollection seasonally. Last year, in 2018, I made few changes to the garden as Buffalo Horticulture was so busy it left me no time. I did add some round forms - Boxwood and Yews - to the front as the lack of structure was making me crazy. In 2017, again in a move towards structure, I added a collection of woody shrubs to a garden with a proportioned rectangular geometry but no mass to command space: Lacking mass as in the previous two years I had added three large beds as I had taken a love and interest in growing cut flowers. 


Before this - and here is where my memory gets somewhat fuzzy - there wasn’t really gardening. The work for the first two years I owned the house was in reclaiming a yard that had been taken by weed trees - Norway Maple and Buckthorn - that are so common in the city, spontaneously germinating in cracks, edges, and fence lines. The backyard was a dark cave. Bare soil as so little light penetrated. Secondly, the longest foundation wall of the house was buckled in and needed to be tore down and rebuilt and so up came the broken up concrete driveway as 1/3 of the sites green space was to be dug down to five foot depth to accommodate construction access to the foundation wall. And as everything was put back together we resolved a common drainage issue as the back doorsill is only one inch above city sidewalk height, sixty feet away, and not enough slope to allow the water to drain off.


This was how it started. Having just begun reading what is supposed to be an classic garden writing book - “We Made A Garden” by Margery Fish - I’ve thought it may be nice to start writing some of my own garden’s story. But there is so much to tell that for now the best I can get together is this short introduction so I can put out some short bits and pieces on all the details, people, and places it followed me through.

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