Digging in

Sandy always fretted if she'd let the front yard go too long without attention. I never thought it looked all that bad. Our gardens have a wild look about them, so it sometimes takes a discerning eye to know what's intentional and what's not. That happened organically, but it served us well.

Now the front yard nags at me, chastising me every time I return home. I fear my neglect is diminishing Sandy's legacy, yet I've been unsure quite how to begin. The front yard was Sandy's domain, and I don't even know the names of everything she planted, let alone what she did to keep it up. I focused on the vegetable beds in the back, and chopping compost, and tending to the trees.

When I bought the house, I'd not done much with the front yard. I immediately wrenched out some flowering cabbages (which I loathe) and added a narrow strip of pansies and petunias along the front walkway. I planted a Japanese Maple in the middle of the small yard to serve as a psychological barrier between the sidewalk and the house, as there wasn't much distance between the two. And the rest was grass.

When Sandy moved in, she emphatically stated that I could not expect her to garden. She resentfully referred to herself as a garden widow on spring mornings that I'd slip out of bed early to tend to seedlings or do some weeding. Yet within a year, she wanted a plot of land of her own.

Mowing the front yard became Sandy's chore when she moved in, so she already felt some ownership of the area when we negotiated her plot. She'd get a front triangle of the yard to do with as she pleased. Being Sandy, she consulted books and the Internet, did a bunch of thinking and planning, and headed to the garden store, where she bought everything that looked pretty. The triangle was filled almost immediately.

She claimed a second one, and then a third, and finally the last bit of the front yard became hers as well. The only thing that remained mine was the Japanese Maple, which encroached further into her territory every year. She groused about it, but she also loved that little tree.

Sandy had just begun to take over the planting strip when construction on the condos began next door, and we lost our planting strip and sidewalk for more than a year. We transplanted a bunch of things in haste, but the lithadora and several other plants didn't make it. When the planting strip came back, she dug in with a vengeance.

Removing a dead tree so that we could plant the smoke tree,
back in 2001. The front yard had long been fully planted.

I helped select and plant trees for the front yard, but that was the extent of my intellectual involvement.When I helped her in the front, I was her assistant, doing whatever tasks she asked me to do.

She outgrew the front yard within a couple of years and started in on flower beds in the back, sometimes threatening to encroach on my vegetable beds. Eventually, with the perennials needing less and less care each year, she also became an enthusiastic vegetable gardener. The woman who was adamant about not gardening added her touch to every inch of our property.

Our street is a busy pedestrian thoroughfare, and the front yard is what people see as they pass our house. Many stop to compliment the yard. In fact, our garden has become a sort of landmark for a lot of folks, the same way Sandy and I referred to certain areas by houses or gardens.

After we'd bagged leaves from a nearby park for compost in the fall of 2010, a passerby chatted with us as we carried them to the house. "Oh," he said, as we stopped at our walkway, "I should have known this was your yard. Of course you're composters; you have such a beautiful garden."

When I canceled Sandy's membership at the gym around the street, the condolences included comments about how the membership director had always loved walking by our garden and had been delighted to see Sandy's address when she joined the gym.

When I told one neighbor about her death, in late September, he said, "I thought something must be wrong, with your yard and all. . ."

So I know that people notice. And I know that Sandy cared. And, after all, I was a Master Gardener for seven years. I pulled on my gardening jeans this morning and headed out to start with the goals I could easily identify. As so often happens with gardening, each task revealed the next several, and I remembered that I do know what I'm doing. The list of specific things that need doing grew in direct proportion to my confidence in my ability to do them, so I'll have plenty to confidently do over the next several weeks.