What the Edge Knows
I have been working with edges lately.
That isn't exactly new territory for me. I've understood the ecological value of edges for a couple of decades, and moving from Indiana to Florida twelve years ago gave me a fairly dramatic education in what happens when a gardener changes climates. I went from Zone 5b to 9b and discovered that a respectable amount of gardening experience can become surprisingly irrelevant with one moving truck.
Now, ten months into life at Shimmering Ridge Sanctuary, I find myself almost comically in the middle. Zone 7b. Apparently, I have landed at the gardening midpoint—a really big edge— between my former lives.
I am having a ridiculous amount of fun with it.
There are plants I missed terribly in Florida that I can grow again here. Lilacs! There are plants from my Florida gardening years that I get to keep playing with. And then there are the plants belonging to this mountain landscape itself—mountain laurel, for one—that remind me I haven't simply split the difference between Indiana and Florida. I have come somewhere entirely new.
It feels a little like inviting people from two very different periods of your life to the same dinner party and discovering that they get along beautifully.
Of course, a USDA zone only tells a fraction of the story. I have known this, but it has become particularly obvious on this property. I live on a ridge. There are slopes and hollows, exposed places and sheltered ones, forest canopy and open sun, dry ground and places where water gathers. The sunlight reaching a spot in February may be completely gone by June.
Then, add in an elevation of ~ 2,500 feet, with about 100' elevation change Within The Property. Whole new ballgame.
There are edges everywhere. There are edges on my edges... I walk around with my phone out taking notes and photos and sitting to watch the birds, squirrels, and insects to see where they are coming and going. For a nature geek, this land is damn near overload. I love talking about it too...to anyone who will stand still long enough to let me.
This week, my friend Annice and I gave a gardening presentation about this very thing—the Edge, and the places where one set of conditions begins becoming another. It was so much fun to be in front of people and sharing knowledge again. Great practice for my upcoming retreat facilitation and also for the eventual tours, workshops and seminars I plan to offer as well.
We talked about slowing down to observe what is already happening in our landscape and taking time to see what it may need before we go off half-cocked with our master garden plan in hand and a wish list 65 plants long for the local garden center.
This is also the part where I should admit to having several plumeria living on a mountain in North Georgia, which should tell you everything you need to know about my willingness to negotiate with reality when properly motivated and having enough space to bring them inside. But I digress...
Information is what I am after. "Observe and Interact" is the phase I am currently in. Ten months isn't long enough to know a piece of land. Right now, I am still watching where the water goes, where the wind quiets, what appears in abundance, what doesn't, and how the mountain changes from one season to the next.
I know enough about edges to recognize their possibilities. What I don't know yet are these edges. And perhaps that is one of the loveliest things about gardening over a span of decades. Experience doesn't eventually deliver us to some glorious point where we know exactly what to do everywhere.
It may simply teach us how much there is to notice.
I came here carrying plants, preferences, experience, and a very long and running mental list of things I finally get to grow again. The mountain, meanwhile, was already here doing what mountains do.
Somewhere between the garden I imagine and the land that actually exists, a blended, healthy, balanced and 'improved' garden is beginning to emerge.
I suspect that's where the most fascinating and beautiful parts live.
In that very edge.