Part of coping with loss, according to the serenity prayer, is accepting what cannot be changed and trying to find some kind of positive path through the present moment and out into the future. So, I'm leaving the cutting swap here on atp, but still plan to keep gardening - to stop gardening would be like turning off my soul - my hope is that in the process of trying to bring back my garden that somewhere out on the internet there might be some solutions. My cameras seem to be hacked - a small footage of a cat on my porch kept repeating over and over - or if I went out onto the porch - the camera did not pick that up - hence my opinion the camera has been hacked. I need to become more knowledgeable about digitalized, computer-oriental devices.
To my erstwhile participants in the atp cuttings swap - https://garden.org/apps/swap/v... :
I wish you all luck with your cuttings and would love to be able to stay in this swap. Over almost half a century, my late dh and I made our garden with just a shovel and crow bar and lots of blood, sweat and tears. We successfully filled it with plants from seeds and cuttings that eventually naturalized into a relatively self-maintaining garden (Brooklyn Botanic.Garden handbooks were wonderful guides to creative garden design, as well as practical guides to designing for low maintenance - and because of those, my gardens were successful in those respects).
Memories of my grandmother's flower garden in Massachusetts 1949 inspired me and my dh's love of all things green and Native American cultures that lived in harmony with them - not to mention dreams on my lunch hour reading Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Jeckyll, Leopold Aldo(sp?), Henry Mitchell, Helen Van Pelt Wilson, Louise Beebe Wilder, Elizabeth Lawrence, etc.
Vandalism has become so much more sophisticated in this age of drones, robotics, hackable internet-based devices - I'm a technological dinosaur, relatively speaking - can only watch it all devolve by one petty act at a time. Did you know drones are used in utility break maintenance? One flew by our front porch window, just under the eaves, while my husband lay dying while on hospice, at sunset, 3 days before he passed away.
The hellebores began with five 2-1/2" pots that over 40 years matured, self-sowed into a thick impermeable patch - those plants are not walking off by themselves, nor did mature clumps of crab?/basket? grass with last year's dead growth walk in near them by themselves either within the last week, nor did stones lift themselves up out of the dry walls where we placed them, to block the brick paths disappearing beneath them. ~8" patches of sweet woodruff were cut out and replaced with sheets of moss. Some of these small petty acts of vandalism have been ongoing since 2014, some are ongoing.
You'd think that during this pandemic, when travel is minimized to control the virus, that there might be some relief. Last year, yards and yards of sod containing marsh marigolds were dug from a local renovated trolley path and planted for about 20' on our accessway, into which logs are gradually being dug - perhaps to replace top soil dug out to pot stolen plants as they are removed from our gardens? Who would do such a thing indeed?
If I talk about this, I'm a nut - naysayers say "who would do such a thing"?
Well, I know what my late dh and I made was successful for almost 30 years - within almost a half-century of trying.. Just wish we had moved to Canada instead of Oella back in 1974. Over 50 years some things have changed - but when it comes to how small the human spirit can become for just a few perhaps trying to "stimulate" the local real estate market- some things do not.
I hope this has been of help to any other gardener walking in my shoes during this pandemic and that the Golden Rule makes a come back, where adversity now trumps it.
Wishing everyone another great swap and pass-a-long experience again. - and to dh wherever you are now - thank you for almost 50 years of the freedom to be.
karen
