[Partially transcribed from diary for garden references. The rest of it need not concern you!]

[Written while waiting for and riding subway into the city.]
…
I planted seeds today. Actually, the planting was the smallest part of what I did today, but it was the excuse for all I did. Last weekend I cleared all the ivy from the side porch. Today I sifted all the leaf mold and broke up the soil in the narrow strip between the porch foundation and the driveway. Finally, eventually, I planted the sweet pea seeds I started soaking last night before I went to bed. I moved the leaf mold and dirt from the tarp I’d set up on the driveway to the backyard.

I was exhausted. I moved a log to contain one of the new beds I’d just created, reset the adirondack chairs, the ones I’d built … from kits at the apartment [Garden #3 in Park Slope], and collapsed into one of them.

I was too tired to move. For this I was rewarded. Not only did the bird feeder, just 10′ from me, continue [ended abruptly for subway transfer.]

My partner and I drove from our new home in Brooklyn to the New York State Sheep & Wool Festival, held each year at the Dutchess County Fairgrounds in Rhinebeck, New York. It was a looong drive there and back, but the festival was interesting, and great fun. I hope the photos below convey this.

[Transcribed from notebook. Specific date was not recorded.]

We moved into our new house about six weeks ago, the last Thursday in May. This will be my fourth garden in New York City since I moved here 26 years ago, in the Winter of 1979.

House and garden have both been neglected. Both are in need of maintenance, repair, and loving back to their full flower. Both will need work, time, patience, investment. I can envision the trajectories and futures of both.

Particularly, I can imagine bringing the house and garden(s) back together. Each want the other, each need the other. In time, the house will become part of the gardens, grwing out of them, sheltering them, providing the largest bones in the architecture of the garden.

And the house will change to fit and frame the gardens. The siding will be returned to its original design of clapboard and shingle, though how many years and $10K it will take I shudder to comprehend. In longer time, the back will be returned, I believe, to an open porch, the kitchen expanded and opened up to blur the boundary between indoor and outdoor space, between house and garden, between the manufactured and the spontaneous.

Vines will climb up the sides of the screened porches, screening and sheltering them further, filling the porches with fragrance, filtered light, luminous color. Mature shrubs will shade the south side of the house in summer, and draw birds to their berries and hold the snow in winter. Flowers and foliage will spill from window boxes and containers ankling the paths, forcing one to stop to inspect, to smell, to feel, to slow down.

I can see all this as it will be, as it’s coming to be.

[Text transcribed and sketch scanned from notebook.]

Sketch from notebook showing proposed design for backyard garden with renovation of the back of the house. The back of the house faces East. South is to the right, and North to the left, in this sketch. Changes to the house envisioned in this sketch include restoring the pocket doors between the dining room and living room, converting the two back bedrooms and half the current kitchen to a porch opening onto the back, and re-orienting and expanding the kitchen along the porch.

Four Gardens:

• Front: Heirloom/Cottage
• North: Shade/Path
• South: Shrub Border, Wild Garden
• Back: Sanctuary, Native, Habitat

[Transcribed from notebook and amended.]

• Cercis canadensis, Redbud
• Hydrangea quercifolia “Little Honey”, Oak-Leaf Hydrangea cultivar
• Lonicera sempervirens, Trumpet Honeysuckle
• Ilex verticillata, Winterberry
• Viburnum (native species)
• Cornus canadensis, Bunchberry
• Arctostaphylos uva-ursi, Bearberry
• Gaultheria procumbens, Wintergreen
• Rhododendron (native species)
• Kalmia latifolia, Mountain Laurel
• Prunus (native species)
• Rosa carolina, Pasture Rose (possible other native species)
• Trillium
• Arisaema triphyllum, Jack-in-the-Pulpit
• Viola (native species)
• Asarum canadense, Wild Ginger
• Lilium (native species)
• Solidago (native species)
• Lobelia (native species)
• Mertensia virginica, Virginia Bluebells
• Hepatica acutiloba, Sharp-lobed Liverwort
• Aster (native species)