Written by J. Mitchell Brown
Photography by Donna Huffman

his spring, I have found myself mired in quite the conundrum. As I sit here at my desk and write this article, it is a beautiful 80 degree day. The pollen is thick in the air, but I’m OK with that because I know that spring is here to stay.

We’ve had a lot going on over the past few months, and I am dying to get out in the yard and spruce up the place. I need to get out there and do some work to the hundreds of feet of wood edging that I painstakingly put in last year. I need to get a handle on some weeds that are cropping up here and there. I need to run up to Columbia and raid my mother’s greenhouse with this year’s supply of annuals. I could handle a few truck loads of pinestraw spread throughout the place. Fertilizing, transplanting, raking, repotting, staking, pulling...the list is endless.

But I can’t. And that is counter-intuitive to me.

As my wife and I quickly figured out, our little one bedroom guest cottage that we bought last year might have been perfect for just us, but with the recent addition of another mouth in our tribe, one bedroom just ain’t going to cut it. But we’re not quite in a position to be erecting “The Main House” like our long term plan is, so we’re compromising and doing an addition to our guest house to include another bedroom for the little one, and a much needed office for me. This shoe-box sized desk, however much a sentimental family heirloom, hasn’t done a whole lot for my organizational skills. So I’ve finally got everything in place to have a builder come over and do the addition.

The problem is, my yard looks like a chicken coop, and I’m desperately wanting to get out there and clean it up so the neighbors won’t worry about their property values going down. But it would be pointless since I know that the builder will be bringing in tractors, dumpsters, cement mixers, pick-up trucks, generators, and foot traffic galore.

I looked out at my yard today and saw the scores of hours I spent last year trying to turn what was previously a jungle into nicely kept gardens. I looked at the little bit of grass that I toiled over to coax out of the ground. I looked at a perfect group of plants that I found just the right spot for, but now realize that’s exactly the spot that a pallet of bricks will probably be set. I saw an eight foot tall, needle sharp yucca plant that is smack-dab in the middle of where a new footing will need to be poured. I saw a thousand individual ferns that are located in just about the same location that my new desk will be. I saw a brick wall whose existence makes even less sense than it did last year when it was brand new and exactly placed to enhance my gardens (and according to my architect friend, it didn’t make sense then, either!). But mostly, I saw thousands of dollars of plants whose lives are in dire jeopardy if I don’t do something before the builders come.

So, since I’m so determined (or cheap, as some might say) I needed to figure a way to preserve these plants. As I was cleaning up some of the mess that was going to be in the builders way, I noticed a semi shady spot behind our house up close to a fence that I realized wouldn’t have much construction traffic and I hatched a plan.

I had some leftover bricks from my Wall-That-Doesn’t-Make-Sense that I was using as a border on my carport. I began schlepping these bricks to my spot behind the house and erected two little walls that were perpendicular to the fence and about 12 feet apart. I made the walls about 18 inches high. I then went to my neighbor’s house and “borrowed” two wheelbarrows full of some builders dirt that he had dug up during a recent excavation for a koi pond he was installing. I hauled those wheelbarrows full of dirt to my spot and dumped them between the walls. I then found a couple of old bags of potting soil I had lying around and added them to the mix. I topped it off with a couple of new bags of soil and mixed it all around thoroughly.

I’m going to use this “temporary” garden to keep my plants alive while the construction guys are doing their thing. It should be easy enough to keep my plants alive for several months. I’m going to have to dig them up or watch them get destroyed anyway, so we might as well try to save them. It might not work, but, as my wife says, “As long as it keeps you out of the house, knock yourself out.”

I figure that there are several keys to making a temporary garden work for you. The first is keeping it cheap, which explains the builder’s sand. Sand, on it’s own, will not provide enough drainage for most annuals, particularly those that thrive in the sunlight. By adding the bags of potting soil, we get enough nutrient rich peat coupled with drainage-enhancing vermiculite, but without spending five hundred bucks to fill up an area that is only going to be around for a matter of weeks.

Finding a spot that is not exposed to a lot of sun is critical to the success of temporarily planting any plant. When I go out there and start digging up my plants to put in the temporary garden, they are going to be suffering some shock (the blooming season is NOT the ideal time to be doing this). But shock mixed in with a too much sunshine can be deadly as the plants transpire all of their moisture out of their leaves and the roots have not healed enough to soak water up as fast as it’s leaving.

The third key to making this work is to plant your plants close to one another. When I say close, I mean C-L-O-S-E. If you picture my little frame being 12 feet long by four wide, you can imagine what it is going to look like when I cram almost an entire yard of planting in it. I will have ferns, daylilies, papyrus, more ferns, calla lilies, banana plants, tea olive, some more ferns, grasses, mandevilla, plecanthrus, and another fern or two. By putting the plants close together, they will be able to support one another as their roots get reestablished and can protect each other should a rogue night of cold surprise us.

One last thing I’m keeping in the back of my head is that there will come a time when I will need to move the plants from their little vacation spot. I have to keep in mind that I just shocked the mess out of these plants when I snatched them up a few months earlier from their established spots in the yard. And now I’m going to shock them again. But if I have a deep enough bed with enough loose potting soil in it, I should be able to gently work my way under the entire root system of the plant without all the tearing and ripping that goes on when plants are fully established. In either case, I will make sure that I water and fertilize the heck out of the plants for at least a month after placing them back in their new spot or else I would have gone through a lot of work for nothing.

Gardens are always a work in progress. I’ve always said that and I am a firm believer in it. But it’s only progress if you’re going forward, and this year, while the house will be definite progress, my yard will be in a deep state of regression. I’m keeping my eye on the bigger picture and can see how beautiful my yard might look next spring. But this spring is a bust. If you come by the house, please understand when I ask you to visit my temporary garden and look past the wasteland that will be my yard. I know it’s a little weird to have a drink with me behind the house staring down at 48 square feet of hodge-podge planting, but it’s all I’m going to have for awhile.