Being mindful.
I took a six-week sustainable garden landscape class with Heather Prince at Morton Arboretum. One of my 2025 goals is to be more mindful of how we plant flowers and shrubs and trees in our yard.
We typically go to Wasco Nursery and just buy things we like or think we’ll like when they grow and bloom. There’s very little rhyme or reason into what we bring home and arbitrarily dig into the soil and plant. That’s true with other aspects of our yard. We wanted to compost so we stuck it in one corner. We wanted a vegetable garden so we installed it where it would get more sun. We’d get a plant as a gift and off we trot to the back. “How about here?” I would ask.
No longer. Now we’re going to plan.
I’m not derelict to think that taking a single class has turned me into a landscape architect. Far from it. But I have learned some basic concepts and considerations when shlepping pots and flats and bushes to be banished to the often colorless backyard.
Throughout this spring and summer, we’re going to transform our home’s backdrop in a thoughtful and somewhat artistic pattern. It’s new being mindful of our yard.
We’ve been mindful in other areas of our life – raising our family, operating a business, controlling our calendar, planning vacations, etc., so this is just an extension of that attentiveness.
The planning won’t end with the new hardscape and landscape.
I know exactly where we should put the apiary next spring.