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Maras Garden :"A Garden in Transition"

This month we travel to Germany to visit our Gardenbuddy Mara who's garden and culture are so diverse. Being the Christmas Holidays, I felt it fitting to share her Garden. With Christmas we focus on goodwill and hope for all. Germany is a country that has had a rebirth and which is now united and prospering. Mara and her gardens have lived and experienced it all. Berlin is interesting today mainly because of its symbolic role in the dissolution of Communism. The fall of the Berlin Wall is considered to mark the end of Communist rule in Eastern Europe.

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Until the late 19th century, Germany was not a united country. It was made up of numerous kingdoms, principalities, duchies and the like. Later, when Bismark unified all of Germany in the 19th century, Berlin was made the nation's capital.

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After the Second World War Germany was divided into four zones: the French, British and American zones made up West Germany with its capital city, Bonn. The Soviet zone became East Germany. Berlin, located right in the middle of East Germany, was itself divided into four sectors, like the entire country. When the Russians closed off access to West Berlin in 1948, the allies responded with the famous Berlin airlift - flying in all the commodities needed to keep the city alive by planes that landed every few minutes round the clock. The blockade was lifted a year later, after which West Berlin could be reached from Western Germany by plane, by boat along the river, or via three official transit roads.

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In November 1989, as the Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, pressure from protesting East German citizens forced the authorities to open the wall. Within days people (including me :-)) had begun hacking at it from both sides, effectively accomplishing what Ronald Reagan had called for when, some time before, he visited Berlin and said "Tear down this wall." In 1990 Germany was reunited and Berlin once again became its capital. For us West Berliners this meant that for the first time we could visit places nearby. My part of Berlin is very close to the city of Potsdam, home to Frederick the Great's beautiful castle of Sanssouci - and the famous nursery of Karl Foerster. Neither of which I had been able to visit before.

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Since then Berlin has become pretty much a normal capital city - except that it has two of everything: two zoos, two main opera houses, two state universities, etc., etc., one each from the former west and the former East Berlin.

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I garden at the edge of a city that, until fifteen years ago, was an island surrounded by land. Everyone celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall in their own way but mine was a trip to the nursery that Karl Foerster founded in the early 1900s. Although it's only about a 15-minute drive from my house, it had been completely off limits since its location is outside the city limits. It was a thrill actually to see such a large selection of plants, the likes of which had up to then only been available by mail order, shipped from West Germany. I still have some of the plants I bought during that first visit, including a now enormous Fargesia nitida bamboo.

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I don't know what influenced me to become a gardener. Gardening doesn't run in my family, but I have always loved planting things and watching them grow. Before I had a garden, when we were still living in the middle of the city, I had a balcony crowded with double rows of flower boxes and pots. Not satisfied with the usual plants available back then, tagetes, petunias and pelargoniums, I used to buy packets of seeds of every imaginable annual. Each summer the balcony transformed itself into a jungle of wildly different flowers (rather like my garden now.)

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Then we rented a house at the outskirts of town in what used to be a farming village, where I got to play in the soil and make all the beginner's mistakes. After five years the house was sold, and DH and I agreed that moving back to town was not an option either of us wanted to consider. We ended up buying a house not far from the one we had rented. That was exactly twenty years ago and I started the garden the day we took possession.

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The first obstacle that had to be overcome was the 15cm thick terrace of reinforced concrete that covered most of the area destined to be a garden. This had been put in by the previous owner with the idea of someday using it as the ceiling of an underground swimming pool. Luckily he never got that far, but removing the terrace was a big job for specialists with their motorized diamond-studded circular saw.

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By autumn I had planted about a dozen historic roses, several clematis, and of course perennials everywhere, including a nice selection of daylilies. The next obstacle turned up over a year later: Voles. First the daylilies went, followed by other perennials, then most of the roses and clematis. Overcoming this obstacle has turned my garden into the nightmare of any treasure hunter with a metal detector. Every other plant now grows in a subterranean wire cage.

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When I first started gardening, there were plants I liked and others I definitely disliked. But I've found the more I know about plants, the more I like them all. And obviously I want to grow every plant I like. This is a problem when your garden is small, like mine, and results in something more like a chaotic collection of flowers than a well designed ensemble. Maybe someday I'll succeed in combining both objectives. I do have a few current special interests, though, including Saxifraga fortunei varieties, Anemonella, Helleborus (like so many GBs), brown New Zealand grasses. Oh, and roses and clematis.

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In addition to the usual beds and borders, we also made a small pond that is now home to lots of newts and visited by frogs. I think ponds possibly give the most pleasure per square centimeter of any space in the garden :-)

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My garden is a permanent work-in-progress. First of all because I'm never satisfied with the way it looks, but also because I'm constantly trying to eke out space for more plants. This year's big project was to remove the hedge separating our property from a neighbor's and replace it by a fence. That allowed me to plant up the area in front of it - the only part of the entire garden that gets full sun. Finally I could make roses really happy, so I planted many of them - far too many for the space. Which pretty well sums up my gardening style. :-)

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Thank you Mara for letting us take a stroll about your Gardens. You are such an inspiration in all that you have had to overcome in your gardens and personally as well I myself, would love to visit your Beautiful Country. Hey, Mara?. I didn't even see one Vole!!.

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I would like to take this time to wish each and all of our members a Very merry Christmas and that May your New Year be filled with Much Love, Happiness and That life gives you all your deserve.

Produced by Jeanne

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