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I have never been very much into gardening.  I love having things growing around me, but the process of actually putting those things in the ground and taking care of them… no.  But I’ve found myself with a lot of need for distraction lately.  So, I have turned to gardening.  In the heat.  It;s keeping my brain occupied, but I also keep remembering something my brother talks about all the time: managing one’s expectations.

For years, I’ve watched my parents return from nurseries and garden centers with car loads of beautiful plants for the flowerbeds, but with no idea where they will go or who will plant them.  Inevitably, most of the plants would end up underwatered, unplanted, neglected, or planted in the wrong spots.  The whole ordeal that had started off as fun would end up a disappointment, and a source of frustration.  The expectations did not meet the reality.  The way they managed that was to try to change the reality around them, but that never worked.  Brent’s point was always that it was the expectations that were the problem.

I lived for many years in Alaska.  I love the climate that promotes lots of beautiful growth, but with lots of shade and very little heat.  I would love to have a garden full of cypress trees draped above head, ferns popping out along the bases of the trees, and fuchsias in hanging pots lining the porch.  Moss would grown on the roof of the shed and everyday a light rain would keep the soils moist and the plants would grow up around me and there would be flowers in bloom all summer.  I want a beautiful deck to enjoy the cool evenings and have people over.  Unfortunately, that is not the situation I find myself in.  If I was constantly trying to make that happen, I would spend a lot of my time disappointed and convinced that gardening doesn’t work.  What I have to do is work within the framework available to me.

I want tall shade plants:  Junipers and crapemyrtles are excellent plants that grown to 10-14 feet and provide a great amount of shade.  They have the added benefit of attracting birds and butterflies.  So, I am planning a landscape that depends on these two plants primarily as shade plants.

I want lots of flowers:  Roses.  Roses in Oklahoma, well in my part of Oklahoma, require little care and bloom almost all year.  Climbing roses tied against the house give a nice shade to the inside and allow for the appreciation of blooms.  I also cannot think of a flower that comes in a greater variety of shapes and sizes.  I’ve had a lot of luck with roses, so I’ve popped them in strategically around the house.

I want plants growing on the ground that aren’t grasses:  Grasses are a pretty common xeriscape option, especially as I live on the border of two grass prairies.  I don’t care for them though.  What I do love is vinca, or periwinkle.  Vinca keeps my flowerbeds full of green leaves without having them be full of weeds and grasses.  It also helps keep my soils moist, which the other plants appreciate.

Moss growing on the roof??? Okay, I admit this one is harder to substitute.  So, I’ve decided to try Virginia Creeper.  It does grow wild here, but usually deep in the wooded areas.  If I can provide the right amount of moisture, I’m hoping I can get this creeping vine to grow up the side of the metal shed or vinyl siding on the house.  This one is going to require more effort, and I plan to start it next Spring.

Daily rain?  Now I’ve gone too far!  Brent and I have talked a lot about irrigation systems.  I’m going to invest in the right things so that next year I can have both irrigation and misting available around the house.

I want a new deck:  My back porch is rotting.  It’s time for it to go, and with Brent’s help I’d like to add on a ground level deck with steps down from the house.  It’d be a nice place to spend evenings, as the back yard gets all the evening shade.  That project is happening this fall.

When I look at my plans, they seems overly ambitious.  I worry I’ve gone too far with what I want to do.  Maybe I have.  I’m trying to keep it simple, space out my work, and achieve something more than I have now.  And I have probably set my expectations too high.

So, I’m not going to be creating a replica of the gardens of Versailles, and I won’t be building a living sculpture.  There won’t be any sidewalks with flowers arched above to take a stroll through or fountains with flamingos.  That’s okay.  It doesn’t need to be outlandish to be beautiful.  My plan will probably get pared down over time, or I will wait another year to complete parts of it.  It will be mine, and that is what I’m excited about.  I never really cared about gardening until I started getting my hands dirty.  It’s fun to transform a landscape and to see the plants take shape over time.

 

Here are the plants I’m interested in ADDING to my landscape:

Here are some of the plants I already have that I wouldn’t mind having more of:

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I watched a TED talk by Roman Mars, the man behind the 99% Invisible blog.  It was on the subject of city flags and I didn’t expect much from it; it had come up on YouTube’s autoplay after a video I had chosen to watch.  I was eating dinner, so I just let it go.  I was immediately hooked and by the end I found myself googling flags for cities where I’ve lived to see how bad they are.  And mostly, they are pretty bad.  I couldn’t get it off my mind, so I went to Photoshop and started to make my own.  As Mars points out in his talk, people are passionate about the flag for the city where they live, and people are usually pretty terrible when it comes to great design.

The loudest voices tend to not understand why a flag like the Union Jack, for example,  is so important for the identity of the United Kingdom.  This was apparent during last year’s call for a change to the city flag of Provo, Utah.  It had long been considered one of the worst, but the proposed change caused controversy.  When opened up to the public, the types of submissions received largely failed to follow the basic principles of design, opting instead to put in some sort of agenda for the city.  Flags are unifying, not political.  In the end, Provo voted for and chose a fantastic new flag, one other cities should be envious of.  But it was an uphill battle, which is somewhat surprising… or should be.

New Zealand is in the midst of a second referendum to change their country’s flag to something divorced from their Australian neighbors.  It was bound to be controversial; the current flag was adopted in 1902.  It seems, however, that the issue is more about people not really caring, and opting to vote for the status quo as a way of making that point.  But the prime minister has a point.  The current flag is nearly identical to Australia’s flag, and like it still has the Union Jack on it.  While New Zealand is a part of the Commonwealth, most countries within it have modified their flags following independence in the 1930s and 1940s.  Canada’s fantastic flag is a great example.  The Union Jack persisted on the flag for a while, but by the mid-1960s, the maple leaf flag had been adopted, cementing a true identity for Canadians, removed from that of the people of the United Kingdom.  They do share a queen, but they do not share a cultural identity.  Their flag drives that point and gives the separate peoples something to make them special.  As for New Zealand, they may choose to keep their current flag.  I personally think they should change it.  The proposed change, chosen in a vote last year, is pretty great.  I would’ve gone further and removed the stars, but it’s still a great looking flag.

Looking at state city flags in the United States, I found a strong tendency to stick the state or city seal in a field of color, usually blue, and call that a flag.  And that looks stupid 100% of the time.  A seal can be a beautiful piece of art, incorporating a surprising amount of history into a (usually) circular emblem.  A flag, however, is not a history of one’s city.  It is a symbolic representation of the city.  It’s an icon, a place reduced to the simplest form possible.  The United States flag is another great example of a former British Colonial flag that came into its own with the removal of the Union Jack.  The thirteen colonies had a flag, similar to the current United States flag, but instead of stars there was the Union Jack.  Changing that portion to a field of blue with a star for each state not only changed the meaning of the flag, but it retained its sense of history.  It acknowledges where we came from, but makes clear that we are no longer a part of the British Empire.

Flag_of_the_United_States.svgThe Great Seal of the United States, which can be seen on any one dollar bill, is beautiful.  It features an eagle clutching an olive branch in one talon, arrows in the other talon, thirteen stars above the eagle’s head and a banner in its beak with the motto e pluribus unum written on it.  The olives, leaves, stars, and arrows all number thirteen to honor the original colonies.  The reverse features a pyramid with the Eye of Providence, featuring annuit cœptis written above and novus ordo seclorum written in a banner underneath.  These symbols on our seal feel very american and very much a part of who we are.  The flag, however, is not that.  It has no motto written across it and the name of our country does not appear at the bottom to remind us of what it is for.  We don’t need that reminder, and because the flag is so simple, and fantastically so, neither does anyone else.

One of my favorite city seals is that of Tulsa, Oklahoma.  It’s a really lovelypiece that must look great on letterhead, on business cards, and affixed to the city’s buildings.  It says a lot about the city in a small space.  But the city’s flag is exactly that seal in the middle of a white flag.  It gets lost.  It has no power there and just fails to generate the power it should as a symbol of a city.  I’ve created my own, one I think that honors the city’s seal while becoming more of a symbol that could be adapted in a lot of ways,  making way for a unifier for a city.  It could be something one is proud to put on a bumper sticker or a a patch on a backpack.  Business could use parts of it to mark themselves as local.  It does, in my opinion, the things a flag should do.

It surprised me how much I cared about flags.  Roman mars had started his TED talk with the assertion that 100% of people care about flags.  I raised an eyebrow at that. I did not think I did care about flag all that much, but I really do.  And I think others do as well.  But I do think it’s harder than people think to create a great flag for a city. It would be nice for these flags to change and a symbol of pride become available for cities whose flags just don’t work.

I haven’t picked on Oklahoma’s state flag much.  The state flag of my state is nice, and the official version from 1925 to 1941 was fantastic.  “OKLAHOMA” was added to the flag in 1941, which was unnecessary.  Supposedly, it was done as a literacy statement, but I’m not really sure how the name of one’s state on a flag truly promotes literacy.  At this point, the lettering could go.  Nobody would confuse the flag with another state’s.  I might also stylize the elements a bit.  I was able to draw the flag when I was a kid, but I remember it being overly intricate.

While I was tackling Tulsa’s flag, I made a whole bunch of flags.  Some of them are for communities that are small enough that they have never had a flag of their own, some are redesigns.  One is even for a community that doesn’t have residents year-round.  All were thought through, giving consideration to the various specifics of the town or city.  And I couldn’t help myself – I made some for fantasy places too.  Let me know what you think.

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I’ve been thinkinHomeg about the concept of ‘home’ for a while now.  What is it that give our spaces that feeling that makes us feel good being there.  It isn’t uncommon for an apartment to feel distinctly not homey, particularly ones first apartment after leaving the house where parents and siblings still reside.  It makes tempting the idea that it is the people that make for a feeling of ‘home.’  But it seems equally common for an apartment to feel like the place where that person will spend the rest of their life.  And that happens to folks who live alone.  So, is it the people at all?

I love being with my family.  There was always something about returning for a visit to my childhood home that had a fantastic mix of nostalgia, comfort, and distance.  In 2005, I moved far enough away that visiting required planning and money; my visits to my hometown were reduced to about once every two years.  By my first visit, my parents had sold my childhood home and moved to the country into a brand new manufactured home while they planned out their dream home.  There was no way, I thought, to feel at home in a mobile home sat in the trees just outside of town.

I was wrong.  While it wasn’t the same, the feeling was.  I was in a house that had only even existed for about a year, but it was filled with familiar furniture and my parents.  For me, that ruled out the structure and the location.  What seemed to be at play was the combination of the people, the memories I carried with me, and the stuff in the house.  Had my parents simultaneously discovered their mutual love for Victorian furnishings, throwing out the carefully cultivated collection of things in the house, I think the space would have felt as cold as I expected it to.  These objects brought with them the stories that define us as a family.

“I always want objects in my home that have a connection to me or something I’ve loved.  It’s still stuff, but it’s stuff that has meaning.” Nate Berkus makes a great point, and one I’d like to explore in depth for myself.  When I had one of those cold apartments, just out of high school, it was filled with items I can barely remember, mass produced and cheap things.  The only items I even clearly recall are items that had a story, even if the item wasn’t old.  The dresser my dad painted for me for my new place, the sofa he reupholstered, and that is about it.  It would take me years to collect items of meaning, to be given things once belonging to grandparents and parents, and to have the maturity to honor those things and treat them with the respect they had earned.

Six months ago, I moved into the mobile home where my parents spent years hoping to build their dream home.  They settled into their new house over the summer, leaving vacant a space that had surprised me, on a land that is peaceful and beautiful.  I’m honored to live here in this space that has become a part of the story, where my nephews spent so much of their childhood, where birthdays were celebrated, where holidays with family were enjoyed, and where my parents lived and loved and convalesced.

Many of the stories are lost; it had been incumbent on me to ask the necessary questions and carry on the mythologies and lessons of my family, but I have failed to do so.  But I’d still like to explore what meanings these artifacts have for my life, for the lives of my family members, to recall the world in which they came to us and present them to the world.

This is the first entry in a series about my things.