queerbychoice | Fantasy Garden

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Fantasy Garden

If you had a yard to plant things in, what would you plant? What plants are you emotionally attached to, or nutritionally attached to, or aesthetically impressed by? Are there particular kinds of fences or other lawn decor that you're fond of? Or particular landscaping layouts?

I'm not going to have a yard for quite a while, because I'm about to renew my apartment lease for another year (and until the local housing market finishes crashing, I'll probably renew it again some more beyond that). And right now, I can't afford anything but a condominium anyway. But I think by the time I do buy, I'll be able to afford at least a halfplex and maybe a house, so I've been thinking about what I would want to plant in the yard of such a place. (It's amazing how time-consuming just finding out I'm capable of buying a ~~home~~ hideous condominium has turned out to be, even despite the fact that I don't intend to actually buy one anytime soon. The thought of eventually doing so continues to fill the vast majority of my free time, with no end in sight.)

I'm emotionally attached to California coastal redwoods, because I've never lived anywhere that didn't have at least four of them. These are probably one of the main things I would miss if I ever moved out of California, because they're easily my favorite tree ever, and there aren't many places in the world outside of California where it's possible to grow them. Also, it's very important to me to have lots of shade, because I sunburn in about fifteen minutes flat, and coastal redwoods grow very tall very fast and thereby provide that. (They are, after all, the very tallest species of trees in the world.) They do need a little watering to be healthy in Sacramento, because Sacramento isn't really as "coastal" as they prefer. But failing to water them would not be likely to kill them outright around here; it would just make them look sickly, and then I could revive them later when I got around to not being lazy anymore. And I love them, so it would be worth it.

It would probably be more sensible of me to grow giant redwoods (the widest species of tree in the world) instead, because they're native to the Sierra Nevadas and I'm closer to there than I am to the coast. But we had one of those in our front yard when I was a kid, and although I think they're more impressive than coastal redwoods when they're thousands of years old (tremendous width being easier to see from a human vantage point than tremendous height), I think the coastal redwoods are much prettier when they're not thousands of years old. And I'm not going to live long enough to see any tree I plant ever become thousands of years old. Or even hundreds of years old.

I'm also emotionally attached to fennel, but I guess I shouldn't grow that, since the California Exotic Pest Plant Council lists it as an invasive foreign weed that's destroying the California ecosystem. But it's such a delicious invasive foreign weed! Much prettier and much more useful than yellow starthistle. Oh well.

The money-saving aspect of growing my own food is very appealing, but unfortunately I just don't like the taste of most plants. And the ones that I do like the taste of either shouldn't or can't grow here! I'm sure I could eat enough bananas to justify owning a banana tree, but it's much too dry here for any banana tree to survive. I could try an orange tree or an apple tree, I suppose (I do love the smell of orange blossoms), but I wouldn't want to eat more than a tiny percentage of the fruit, so the rest would all rot on the ground. Also, the deep groundwater around my neighborhood is so polluted that I'm not sure it'd be a good idea to eat plants grown around here unless they're plants with very shallow roots. Fruit trees might have deep enough roots that their fruit could poison me with all manner of hideous chemicals.

I'm very emotionally attached to moss, and if I could, I'd probably like to have a yard completely covered with moss in place of a lawn. That's probably not possible though, because it would require a really, really well-shaded yard, and I doubt I'll be so lucky. I'd be very happy if I could attract some moss somewhere in my yard, though.

I do like grass, but I don't like it mown down to tiny spikes the way everybody else apparently likes it. I also wouldn't like the work of all that mowing, of course - but even on a purely aesthetic level, I just think tall grass is much prettier and more comfortable to sit on. So I would like a little bit of lawn somewhere, but maybe only in the back yard, where the neighbors won't so much notice how tall it is and hate me for it. Also, the lawn should probably be composed of really drought-tolerant grasses so I don't have to water it much. California melic would be one good candidate.

I'd like to plant a lot of different kinds of lilac bushes, because (1) they're native to this area and wouldn't need to be watered at all, and (2) they have beautiful purple flowers. I might plant sage, penstemon, and lavender for much the same reasons (the lavender isn't native, but they're all drought-tolerant and they all have purple flowers). I would definitely have a lot of purple in my yard.

I used to collect unusual rocks when I was a kid, and I still have my old rock collection. If I had a yard, I'd put most of those rocks in it. One of them is almost a cubic foot around, and very interesting to look at, and used to be in my dead grandmother's yard. She noticed me admiring it one day and suggested I take it home with me, so I did, and I've had it ever since. It's reddish and kind of glassy and appears to be volcanic. Anyway, it doesn't seem to fit in anywhere in an apartment, but if I had a yard I'd like more big interesting-looking rocks like that.

I tend to like front yards with fences in them, but not fences that block the entire yard from view. I like them to be set back a little from the street, with flowers planted in front of them, and with some ability to see through the fence. But other than that, I like a lot of different front yard fences - iron bars, wooden lattice, brick pillars, stone walls, white pickets, whatever. And all fences should have vines growing on them. In fact, there's nothing I like better in a yard than the sight of vines growing all over absolutely every surface in sight. Unfortunately, I don't know of any particular vines that especially appeal to me more than other vines do. I want a vine that doesn't need to be watered, that's pretty all year round, and ideally, that won't provide a perfect hiding place for ten thousand black widow spiders to set up house. Unfortunately, I'm not too sure about what black widows' tastes in vines are, but I think vines with really big leaves and thick foliage that block out the light are probably the most likely to attract them. So I guess I want sparser vines.

Anyway, all this thinking about gardens has made me wonder what your favorite plants and garden styles are. What would you plant if you had a garden?

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there would definitely need to be beds with pansies and bearded iris - and probably a bunch of daffodils. I'd love a golden chain tree, and would adore a row of raspberry canes, and some old-fashioned concord grapes. also, a green fig tree.

I'm never likely to own a place with a yard, so it's just a dream, but those are the things that make me happy

Irises! I meant to mention those. And pansies too, for the same reason. I'm not really attached to either of them for the plants themselves, mainly because I've hardly ever encountered them. But I'm quite attached to the names of both of them, and I think I should probably have some of them for that reason. There are some pretty drought-tolerant native irises to choose from around here, too.

I've never heard of a golden chain tree before, but I just Google image-searched them, and they're gorgeous! I can definitely see why you'd want one. I see I couldn't possibly grow them here, though, because they can't tolerate anywhere near as much heat as a Sacramento summer - which I guess probably explains why I've never seen one before.

Beware of planting any type or redwood. Their fast and huge growth habit isn't just above ground - their roots tend to do terrible things to house foundations, and, with any reasonably sized yard, there is nowhere in the yard to plant the tree that is far enough from the house to prevent foundation damage.

I would look for something like "eco-turf" to substitute in for lawn. It takes less water, no evil, ecologically unsound fertilizers, and less or no mowing. That said, I would also drastically reduce how much of the yard was devoted to anything lawn-like.

In my own garden I would grow food - probably mustard greens, sweet potatoes, beans and peas, tomatoes, winter squash, and salad greens. I would maybe keep a small flock of backyard chickens.

There was a pie cherry tree in the yard of the house where I grew up, which would make me nostalgically want to grow pie cherries.

I would probably have a few roses - maybe one huge climbing rose.

As for advice on more open, sparse vines, you might want to look into Clematis. It does come in purple. It might not be as drought tolerant as you want, though. You might also like Wisteria and purple passion flower vines, though those are both ones with a lot of dense foliage.

I am always attracted to odd (usually tropical) plants that remind me of Dr. Seuss book illustrations. I would maybe put a "Dr. Seuss garden" in one corner of my yard for those sorts of plants.

Wah, but I love redwoods!

In the house where I grew up, there was a swimming pool about 20 feet from four coastal redwoods, between them and the house. If the root systems had damaged the swimming pool, I'd think it would have been visible to us, but in about 30 years of my parents living there, there was never any such damage evident. I think it helps a lot to deep-water the redwoods, to encourage their roots to grow downward instead of remaining completely shallow. But it's also possible to install a root barrier around the house foundation. (Of course, then the roots will just damage the neighbors' houses instead.)

The California melic I mentioned is a sort of eco-turf, too. But I'd also reduce its area to a small spot in the back yard and none in the front yard.

Chickens are an interesting idea. But mixing chicken-ownership with cat-ownership? It sounds a little scary.

We used to have a cherry-plum tree in the home where I grew up, but the cherry-plums were poisonous, so all they did was make a big mess in the yard and not feed anyone but the ants (who, incomveniently, were not poisoned by them). I never ever want to own a tree that makes that much mess for so little purpose.

I'm not much into roses, either. I don't like the fact that they have thorns, and I don't like the fact that they tend to be somewhat high-maintenance. I don't think I'd want to plant any.

I have been looking into Clematis, and I did notice that some of them have purple flowers. The ones with purple flowers aren't native around here, though, and they'd need me to water them. There are some native ones with white flowers that would be easier to grow. But they're not evergreen, and I'm a bit concerned that they might look ugly for large portions of the year. All the gardening websites tend to show pictures of what all plants look like only when they're at their best, so it's hard to get any sense of what they look like at their worst, which is also important to know.

if I had a chance, anything that likes cold weather and lives near mountains and rock pools.

for now, I have cactuses, and gardenias, and agapanthas, and geraniums and cliveas and bits and pieces of other things - we're in the middle of a drought so it's hard to know what is living and what's just sitting there forlornely ;-)

- a weeping alaska nootka cedar / false-cypress

- lilac trees, and other flowering trees

- fruit trees

- purple coneflowers

- lilies

- lots of tulips and daffodils because it's important to me to have something to bloom in the early spring

- lots of marigolds

- sunflowers, because it's kind of amusing to step outside and see ten-foot-tall flowers

- lots of vegetables

this is pretty much what my parent's garden is like...and since i live with my parents, i'm lucky enough to take advantage of it. the only problem is that my parents don't have any fruit trees, which makes me sad!

I'd like purple coneflowers, too. But I'd be afraid to have lilies because they're poisonous to cats. Stardust is an indoor cat, but I'd be afraid a neighbor's cat would be poisoned, or that Stardust might escape and eat them.

Virginia creeper!

It would depend where I lived; should I ever manage to return to the Northeast, raspberries would be required. I'm not big on grass, and I'd probably plant foliage and flower plants instead. And most certainly trees; I can't actually live without them, and I survive in undertreed South Florida now only because I have two Florida live oak trees just outside the porch, small, but, trees.

In your case, I'd go for the redwoods.

Here, my little porch garden is slowly filling with various cheap plants and flowers that appeal to me. I haven't tried gardening for food yet, although I understand that I could try growing peppers and tomatoes, which would be rather cool. For the moment, I seem to have selected plants with tiny flowers, and a jasmine that has stopped blooming for the season.

When I did own a house, I didn't take advantage of the opportunity to plant and cultivate a garden. I'm not very good at keeping inside plants alive, and I don't like being outside in the heat long enough to keep outside plants alive. In theory, though, I would love to have a vegetable garden and grow lettuce, tomatoes, carrots, collard greens, onions, cucumbers, zucchini, squash, and pumpkins.

A woman I knew had a potted lemon tree that lived in her house during the cold-weather months. The lemons from that tree made DELICIOUS lemonade! But having a potted plant that weighs several hundred pounds is inconvenient.

As far as plants that I favor for aesthetic reasons, I'd love to have hydrangeas, moonflowers, roses, clematis, azaleas, and several different kinds of holly.

I'd also like to have areas with gravel instead of grass and stone benches for sitting and enjoying the yard with company.

You could keep outdoor plants alive if you planted native ones that grow in the wild without needing to be watered!

Hydrangeas are beautiful. Check out climbing hydrangeas, too! Hydrangeas tend to have trouble with the heat here, though, so I'd have difficulty growing them and I'd have to water them a whole lot.

Very good point. I think the key to a successful garden for people like me is good planning and lots of work at the front end, so that my time commitment is minimized throughout most of the garden's life.

I love hydrangeas! There are so many different colors. I once had a type that had varigated leaves and purple flowers. Alas, I killed it.

Oh, and I like stone walls, but that is the New England childhood part of me coming out.

And as far as fruit trees are concerned -- people here just seem to bring their excess fruit into the office, which decidedly works for me.

I have three little gardens in my little yard. And in one I have carrots and theortically lettuce(this years was wrecked during a hail storm and never got replanted) and some herbs. chives, rosemary and basil. YUM. Rosmary and chives are a necessity. And so are carrots.

And the other flower gardens have flowers in them that I never have to water and that come back every year. I would have planted some other pretty ones near my peony, but that garden was taken over by scrap wood from fence building that no one has moved. :P

Okay, I know next to nothing about gardening or planting flowers, so all I can tell you is that I adore tube-roses. If I had a garden, I would make sure to grow tube-roses.

When I saw that you had replied to this post, I was excited because I figured you'd name interesting Pakistani plants I'd never heard of. Then when I saw the word "roses" I was disappointed and thought that you hadn't. Then I Googled for "tube roses" and discovered that you had after all!

But I still can't find any information about how to grow tube roses. I don't think your climate is very similar to ours, though, so I guess they'd be hard to grow here (though it might be possible with a lot of watering).

I'm just about to move to a new apartment with a yard, so this post is very topical for me! At the moment, the yard (which is probably the size of a large living room) is hideously overgrown, but I'm quite looking forward to clearing all the weeds out and planning a proper garden. Thus far, I have bought spring bulbs (purple and cream tulips, purple, cream and yellow crocus and assorted daffodils), but I'd really love to grow vegetables too. Once the fence is mended, I'd like to train climbing roses up it and it would be lovely to have a tree smack-bang in the middle of the lawn (which I have yet to sow!).

Luckily, my Mum is an expert gardener, so I'll be turning to her for advice. Even though the apartment is only a rental, I can't wait to create my own little horticultural sanctuary :-)

Wow, I've lived in apartments where the first-floor ones had yards (I've always been on the second floor) but the yards were never as big as even a small bathroom, let alone a large living room! Even some of the houses around here, and especially the halfplexes, don't have yards much bigger than a bathroom. Good luck in your gardening adventures!

I love fresh organic fruit and vegetables, so if I had a yard I would definitely have a vege garden and some fruit growing-things. (Not just trees. Strawberries are fun, and when I was little my mum had a passionfruit vine. I LOVE passionfruit. Especially on ice-cream). Even though I like some northern hemisphere flowers, I probably wouldn't plant any. They require far too much water in the summer months, and my country is short enough on water as it is.

I would plant golden wattle trees and bottlebrushes, and various other trees and plants that were native to wherever I was living.

You know what kind of food I just realized I need to grow? Nuts! Lots of them grow well around here - huge areas of Sacramento used to be almond orchards - and I like nearly every kind of nut in existence.

I'd probably grow strawberries too, but mainly just because they're almost impossible to kill. My parents grew some, but I was the only member of the family who liked starwberries at all, and I didn't like them nearly enough to be able to eat even 5% of what the plant produced, and my parents kept nagging me to eat the other 95%, which eventually became so annoying that I started never wanting to eat another strawberry ever again, just because I'd had them shoved in my face too often. So then my parents stopped taking care of the strawberry plant in any way and left it to die. But it just kept coming back every summer, and it never did die. So I might grow them just for the sake of having something around that I could keep green easily. Not so much for the strawberries, though I'd eat them occasionally.

The northern hemisphere isn't all wet everywhere. Much of California is a desert, and even though I don't live in the actual desert part, it's still very, very, very dry here. I should probably consider planting some Australian plants!

Nuts are a good idea. When I was growing up, one of my friends had a macadamia nut tree in her back yard. Her family collected them by the bucket-full. And they keep too.

Hmm, yes, I know you live in a dry part of the world. However, I'm not sure if the same applies where you live, but in most parts of Australia in the summer there's water restrictions to prevent water wastage, and garden watering systems are usually one of the first things to go. So unless you had an entire water recycling system set up, it would take an awful lot of manual watering to even keep the flowers alive in summer. Drought resistant plants a much better idea.

I know there's a few countries that have adopted Australian plants, usually various kinds of eucalypt trees. However, half the time they take over and end up becoming a pest.

Ha, macadamia nuts are the only kind of nuts I've ever encountered that I don't like!

I did notice that golden wattle trees are listed as being invasive in many places.

It's true, I would be legally allowed to water a garden considerably if I wanted to. But that would be expensive and most likely very time-consuming, and I know I'd never do it consistently, so all my plants would die. So I don't think there'd be any point in me trying to grow much of anything that isn't well-suited to my climate.

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Fantasy Garden

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How topical!

Re: How topical!

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