Tater Tot's godmother introduced me to Susan Tomlinson's blog, The Bicycle Garden, a few weeks back. Instantly, I was a fan. Susan is a real Renaissance gal--writer, educator, gardener, sustainability proponent, soon-to-be-author. And I have to admit that she exploded my perception of Lubbock as being, well, brown. As her photos reveal, green is definitely en vogue in the Texas Panhandle.
While reading her blog one day, I was drawn to this post about her "prairie homesteader's garden" concept. To introduce RW&G readers to Susan, I sent her a few questions about the theme garden's origins. Her answers will be showcased here today and tomorrow.
Also, expect to hear more from her here in the coming year when her new book from Stackpole Press hits the shelves!
Susan: My interest in creating what I call a “prairie homesteader’s garden” probably began a couple of decades ago—long before I was ever interested in gardening! I had been given a book by a friend, “Letters of a Woman Homesteader” by Elinor Pruitt Stewart. The book is just what the title suggests, letters written by [the author] to a friend, in which she describes her life on a Wyoming ranch around the turn of the 20th century. I didn’t really know much about those early American homesteaders, but I was really taken with her narrative of that life. It was full of the drama of the ordinary, as well as the drama of living so close to the land.
Anyway, her story stayed with me for years. In more recent years, I have visited some abandoned homesteads along the Upper Missouri River in Montana, and I find them both haunting and compelling. I’ve tried to imagine what it must have been like for the women who lived in those simple structures, and who were so dependent on the fortunes of weather and land. It was a very hard life, and so many of them didn’t make it.
Whenever I visit those sites, there is a palpable sense of the ordinary humanness of it all. What I mean is that the people living there were not presidents, or generals, or statesmen—the kind of people who usually make “history.” Some of them were women very like me. In another time, I might have been standing at that iron stove. I might have picked out the fabric for those curtains. I might have drawn water from the river and carried it up to a rose I’d brought from home.
Lately, I’ve also become very concerned how to live here in my own landscape, which is naturally a short grass/mixed grass prairie. I became interested in gardening about fifteen years ago, and from the beginning, I wanted to garden in a way that was environmentally responsible. Around here, that has as much to do with conservation of water as it does with gardening without an overuse of chemicals, so my gardens have been xeric, almost from the start. However, about six or seven years ago, I also started to think about gardening in a way that reflected place. In other words, instead of trying to create a garden that looks like the pictures in some famous gardening magazines (which all seem to be growing someplace in the Northeast), I decided to create a backyard space that was decidedly “Texas” in nature. That is, I was going to put in plants that were either native or that had been grown in the state for many decades (and so had become traditional Texas garden plants). You might think of these as the plants your grandmother might have grown if she had lived here—things like irises, antique roses, Rose of Sharon, and so on. My thinking was that it would not only reflect a tradition of place, those plants would be proven performers for our environment. If you think about it, our grandparents probably didn’t have a lot of time or resources to coddle things that weren’t going to survive, so they would have planted in a manner that was thrifty. And in this case, thrifty also means environmentally sound.
But all that describes my ornamental garden. I’ve never really been much of a vegetable gardener. Oh, I’ve grown the odd tomato plant or two, but I’ve never done much more than that. It’s always been at the back of my mind, however, that once I’d gotten the ornamental garden more or less underway, I’d fix up part of the backyard as a veggie plot. And along with that intention, in my head were these images of those lonely homesteads…I pictured little kitchen gardens outside the doors, stocked with tough, practical plants—survivors like their tenders—and maybe a few favorite ornamentals, brought from home. And because of where the gardens were, I also saw soft, yellow prairie grasses, surrounding the rows of crops.
So this year was the year to knuckle down and start that garden I kept seeing in my head. I may have learned a thing or two over the years about successfully growing ornamentals, but I am learning that I am a rank beginner when it comes to growing food crops. Early this spring, I planted some standard vegetables I got at a local nursery, but this fall I’ve started a winter garden of heirloom carrots and garlic. I also plan to order more heirlooms to start from seed next spring. And, true to the picture in my head, I planted the paths with buffalo grass and blue grama—the foundation grasses of our prairie.
Here is a point I’d like to make about all of this: though my prairie homesteader’s garden is an homage to a time, people, and place, it is also, by virtue of being tied to the history of the landscape in which I live (the plains), more environmentally sound than trying to create a garden that looks like it belongs someplace else.
More tomorrow...Photo credit: courtesy photo.
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