Before visiting my son and his family in the States recently I had been mulling over the difference in terminology between our country and his current home.
His ‘yard’ is at least five times the size of our ‘garden’. To me ‘yard’ has always been (apart from the measurement) associated with my Nan’s home where a toilet outside was reached by crossing the yard whilst stepping over the blue bricks between the two homes that shared this facility, and which featured newspaper threaded with string and hung on a hook. Not to mention spiders (see Blog ’Towards that Time of Year’). There was nary a plant to be seen apart from the occasional dandelion seedling desperately reaching for the sun.
Then, lo and behold, there in the home in Massachussetts was an article from Bill Bryson’s Book ‘I’m a Stranger Here Myself’ where he talks about this very point, his wife being English and a keen gardener and Bill Bryson being neither!
He describes the American homes surrounded by woodland acreage and with yards having huge lawns acting as a buffer between house and trees. This is my son’s ‘yard’ exactly. I am still coming to terms with it. I help out when over there with gardening projects which mostly includes taming the woodland. This will be an ongoing project for as long as they live there. In fact it will be impossible, so taming the fringes to stop it encroaching is more achievable. I love doing this and my son and daughter-in-law encourage me. They are no fools!
Around homes over there, are borders full of hosta or irises which seem to flourish and evergreens such as rhododendrons. Things that more or less look after themselves. Cedar chippings are commonly spread on these beds to stop the weeds. It smells lovely, but the colour is like bright terracotta pottery and not in my opinion pleasant to the eye in any quantity. My son and his wife have made the decision to eliminate this and I have helped, removing the chippings and using it to make several paths weaving in and out of the woodland instead, where it eventually takes on woodland coloured camouflage.
My son has a ‘tractor’ to cut the grass. Even using this it takes about an hour to cut the lawn, not to mention hoovering up the leaves. The woods look lovely at this time of year with the wide range of colours. This is after all New England. But as in this country, the leaves on the ground in ‘The Fall’ look like soggy cornflakes, and they have a lot of them. This American description of the season is of course well known to us over here despite our use of the word autumn. This is possibly because we used it here as well until about the end of the sixteenth century. When the pioneers left for the New World they carried on using it.
They have humming birds migrating through, crickets and frogs join together to emit a strangely exotic chorus on warm summer evenings. It is unfamiliar to my ears, used to the benign but less varied species in this country and generally holidaying in northern climes. There are wild turkeys in them thar woods, not to mention fisher cats (some kind of polecat), snakes, deer and the dreaded poison ivy. Deeper in, trees keel over and branches fall with regularity in highwinds.
It is, nevertheless, and despite my daunting description to the contrary, a great place for my granddaughter to play and explore—the lawn area is, as mentioned above, extremely large! She is still tentative about the deep woodland, hence the little paths on the edges along which she feels safe, and our attempts to push back the encroaching trees.
I thought our garden was a decent size. Big enough to be interesting but manageable. It takes me, however, a little time to adjust when we return from a visit. There is more variety in our garden perhaps. Our lawns take about an hour to cut with the hover mower. Which reminds me, they have not been cut since before we went over to visit and now it is raining.
Wish we had a tractor.
