Our Garden (or Couples' Therapy)

I've been working on two pieces for the past few weeks: one a large abstract, which I will post a peek of later, and one an illustration-type watercolor, about far-away places. Neither is finished, however, and I wanted to enter something for the Mixed Media Monday challenge "Places." So here are two pictures of one of my favorite places: our garden. The main reason I love our garden is that it was inspired by the gardens of the grandmothers of Mr. Alberta and me and created entirely by the two of us. We live on twelve acres in the middle of a forest, the most beautiful piece of land we could find on which to build our dream house eleven years ago. If the house was our dream, the garden was even more so. Gardening is the one thing that the very left-brained Mr. Alberta and I have in common. (He's an accountant; I'm an artist. He keeps lists in his head; I can't remember what I'm supposed to do 10 minutes from now. I'm a crybaby; he's stoic. He's an introvert; I'm an ...well, YOU know!) but we both love old-fashioned gardens, thanks to our very southern grandmothers, who grew figs and roses and wisteria and most important of all: tomatoes! The first thing I ever planted was in my grandmother's yard: a watermelon directly under my swing which hung from a branch of a crepe myrtle tree. To tell you the truth, I think I just spit some seeds into the dust there, but Mumu tended them carefully and transplanted the seedlings into her flowerbed. Weeks later my whole family celebrated by eating the one watermelon I produced, which turned out to be one of the rare yellow ones. Well, I was hooked from then on. Mr. Alberta shared a similar childhood experience in his granny's yard, and, since then, I think we have both simply tried to recreate that childhood magic by planting every single thing we could remember our grandmothers growing. I planted roses and hostas and hydrangeas; he planted strawberries and camellias and magnolias. Each year, in the fall, we take a day off from work to garden together. We have iris from his great-grandparents' homeplace and muscadines like the ones on Mumu's arbor. I discovered, at some point during the last 25 years, that, surprisingly, unlike me, Mr. Alberta has TWO well-developed sides of his brain. In addition to his quantitative and organizational skills, he also has a lovely talent for landscape design. After trips we've taken, he's created areas in our yard in different garden styles. We have a secret little Charleston battery bench surrounded by camellias and crepe myrtles and a woodland hellebore garden complete with stone faun and rhododendrons. There are boxwood hedges and a stone wall that echo the ones we saw when we visited the Cotswolds for our 20th anniversary. I think our little heaven overlooking a small pond surrounded by oaks and willows and honeysuckle is the most beautiful place on earth. It's our sanctuary, a place so secluded I can garden in my nightgown, if I want to, and Mr. Alberta can escape the deadlines and pressures of the IRS. Our garden is just about the only common "ground" (pardon the pun) we share, and I think it's probably the biggest reason we'll be celebrating our 25th anniversary next month. We designed it together from sweet memories of sunrises on our grandmothers' sleeping porches and lightening bug twilights in their backyards, from Nehi Grape Colas iced in their birdbaths and Easter Eggs hidden among the buttercups, from surprise lilies that pop up like magic overnight and autumn Saturday morning pecan-picking-up contests. We're an unbeatable combination: he grows the tomatoes, and I won't give him my recipe for spaghetti sauce. He will never leave me!