Savage Beginnings

I was going through some old photo CDs and I found these photos from the first year of the front yard garden in 2004. I had planted these maximilian sunflowers that I had dragged all the way from New Mexico -four years prior. They grew to 14 feet tall! Where does the tree begin and the sunflower end?

I planted cosmos sulphureus, and they got pretty damn big too. There were insects singing in there that I had never heard in the city -probably because I had threw in some plants from a garden in Maine. It was lovely in its wildness, but awful too.

There was a black-eyed-susan vine that had cute flowers but spread like a monster. The chain-link fence was still up, and overall things looked pretty ratty and wild.

The Boltonia I still grow, but no more B.E.S. vine, no more cosmos, no more Plume Poppy (you see it in the back left -one plant from Maine that became so many), no more of most of the plants I started with. Despite how it looked, I still was in love with it and the process of change over the years. I still have the maxamillian sunflowers, but I learned how to keep them shorter when I came around to understanding that they were asters. In my neighbor's garden, 'B' she goes by, I watched how she clipped back asters to keep their height under control.

I hear a rumour that my landlord will remove his remaining telephone poles from the other side of the house. If he does, and no one stakes a claim, I'll have doubled my 75 square feet to 150 in one fell swoop. I wonder if that new side will look like these photos do, when the front yard garden was new.