An Unlikely Vineyard by Deirdre Heekin

Author:Deirdre Heekin [Heekin, Deirdre]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781603584586
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2014-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

They in turn produce not only honey for our table, but also future propolis for our plants.

One piece of the farm doesn’t exist without the other. The finely wrought web and the gossamer chains connecting each of these moving parts amplifly and shape. Like a narrative or an assemblage, the whole is greater than the pieces. It is what makes this small plot of land cultivated with nature so vibrant and full of perfectly imperfect life.

Walled Garden

Much like I longed for a little house in an orchard, I always desired a walled garden. Walled gardens evoke great houses with extensive kitchen gardens; forgotten and secret gardens; wildly romantic naturalistic gardens; enclosed private, quiet, and contemplative gardens. Somewhere along the way, I became entranced by the idea of the sunken walled garden ... an adaptation of an old stone cellar hole, the house long gone.

I HAD SEEN such a cellar hole near my parents’ home. The old stone foundation dug deep into the earth as well as reaching slightly above the grade of the land. One wall had collapsed, allowing the passerby to see something of the inside. It anchored the center of a wild meadow that no longer saw cows or sheep to graze it. The stones were dark and gray, round and oblong, irregular. Typical of the native New England stones that come up from the ground every time you plow or hoe, not unlike knobby potatoes in winter. The stones were covered in lichen and moss, the colors of verdigris and tree bark. The field was overgrown; the cellar hole, too, overgrown, a forgotten remnant of an old farm. Queen Anne’s lace, black-eyed Susan, dock, fragrant bedstraw, and wild sorrel grew rampant between the walls. A matted-down path wended its way in and around the stones, probably worn by a single deer searching for dinner. A twisted and knotty apple tree hung over the edge of the wall, in the spring the blossoms profuse and pink, and in the fall the branches heavy and drooping with celadon-colored fruit.

This sunken garden captivated my imagination like a good story or a mesmerizing painting. It was a marriage between human structure and landscape, the wall and its bevy of wild flowering plants sitting snugly in the meadow, human architecture accepted by nature.

I wanted to know the story of this garden. Where had the house or barn gone? Had it been destroyed by fire? Had it fallen into disrepair and been taken down? Had it been abandoned once before, like it so clearly was abandoned now? Where was the family that had lived there? And if I couldn’t find out the exact history of the place, my imagination wanted to create it.

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