My front and back yards were included in a Green Home and Garden Tour this past week. Organized by the Princeton Environmental Commission and Sustainable Princeton, the event packed into a Saturday tours of four gardens in town, plus tours of some very creatively designed homes.
In a 2023 video, the commission nicknamed my yard the
Livestreaming Yard for all the strategies I've employed over the years to utilize stormwater runoff to feed a series of raingardens.
I was feeling considerable trepidation in the weeks prior to the tour. Would any of the garden's late-summer glory linger through September? And there was a small matter of deferred maintenance, given that my passions and energies these days are mostly directed towards caring for Herrontown Woods. Back in 2017, my private yard had, in fact, served as the prototype for what evolved into the public Herrontown Woods Botanical Art Garden, or "Barden."
Throughout the week prior I methodically grappled with errant vines, cast truckloads of woodchip mulch over cardboard to suppress weeds, stacked firewood, reopened overgrown paths and thinned out volunteer trees--all the while feeling incredibly grateful that the fear of public humiliation was motivating me to do what should have been done long ago.
When the day of the tours arrived, the garden had regained a pleasing order, and a surprising number of wildflowers were still in bloom.
The twelve foot high Jerusalem artichokes--a native sunflower with showy flowers on top and tasty tubers underground--made good conversation pieces.
When not talking about the berms and miniponds that redirect or capture runoff to spare the house and feed the flowers, I sang the praises of stonecrop (
Sedum spectabile), a nonnative whose flowerheads slowly transition from green to pink to burgundy to chocolate.
New England aster and panicled aster spoke for themselves,
while bumblebees crawled into the tubular turtlehead flowers to feed, or maybe take an early fall nap.
In late September, seedheads of ironweed, swamp mallow Hibiscus, and Joe-Pye-Weed can be nearly as ornamental as flowers.
The biggest hit, though, was the patch of pawpaws--a native fruit tree. Though in the same plant family--the
Annonaceae--as tropical fruits like chirimoya and guanabana, the pawpaw is native to North America. Its custardy insides taste like a mix of mango and banana.
What was not to be seen was as important as what could be seen. Through vigilance and early intervention, the yard has been spared the uber-weeds that plague many other yards--weeds like stiltgrass, lesser celandine, and mugwort. I've been less successful quelling creeping charlie, also known as ground ivy.
And though there's been some toil over the years, there's been no pricetag, excepting a purchased shrub here and there. Many plants arrived in the form of seed collected from wild populations along the canal. Nature is generous, as are other gardeners one meets along the way, which was how I ended up with pawpaws.
Thanks to the organizers of the event and volunteers Mitch Jans and Per Kreipke, who helped sign people in throughout the afternoon.
