Written by J. Mitchell Brown
Photography by Donna Huffman

y home, on the banks of Huger Cove, sits on land that back in the earlier days of Bluffton used to be a liquor store. We named the house The Jungle Gem, because when we first bought it, the land was all but grown over with Virginia creeper, smilax and kudzu. You could barely see the little one bedroom house that was tucked back in there. In fact, the house had only been built a couple of years prior, but it took no time for the natural surroundings to take over everything that was put there.

Right after we bought the place, I was standing on the cove, enjoying my ritual rum-and-coke, and throwing a stick for the dog. She was having a blast bounding down the cove bank and splashing through the water and coming back up to where I was sitting at our picnic table. After a few times of throwing the stick, I noticed she was coming back and leaving a darker and darker pool of what I thought was water where her paws were. Upon closer inspection, I learned that she had cut one of her dew pads cleanly off her paw on something razor sharp in the cove. It looked like it must have hurt, but she’s a trooper and showed no weakness. She was rather upset at me for stopping our game to tend to her wound.

After an expensive trip to the vet to have her paw sewed up, I went down to the area of the cove where she was bounding around and was shocked to find a virtual cornucopia of broken liquor bottles, sardine cans, juice bottles, and Vienna sausage cans tucked in the bank side of the cove. It had rained recently, and as water pours down through our lot from Lawrence Street, I remembered it had channeled a chute at this point on our lot where the water seeks the path of least resistance to get itself into Huger Cove and onward to the May River.

Later that week, I tilled up an area of our side yard where I was going to plant some cast iron plants, bottle brushes, and ruella. It was a jungle of a mess when we moved here, so my plan was just to wipe the canvas clean, so to speak, and start over. I quickly realized why it was an area the previous owner wanted nothing to do with.

As soon as the tines on the tiller hit that dirt, the air was awash with flying shards of glass. I figured that was just a fluke, so I restarted the tiller in another spot. This time, I got an old rusted mattress spring wound around the tiller. To make a long story short, what I was planning on being a quick hour long job, turned into a two day marathon of tilling, cleaning, and removing debris from what can only be described as a burial ground for junk.

Apparently, what the folks used to do was come to this liquor store, buy their toddies, and then proceed around to the back of the store to enjoy their drinks immediately on the banks of the cove. Instead of policing up the area, the bottles where thrown on the ground in piles around the places people preferred to sit. Over the past couple of years, I have collected several hundred great looking old bottles from the cove and lands surrounding my house. (I am still in want of the elusive South Carolina Dispensary Bottle, though.) That doesn’t explain how old mattresses, a sink or two, and even an old Datsun ended up on the land, but I imagine it has something to do with the consumption of all those thousands of bottles of liquor!

So anyway, the area around the Jungle Gem is certainly a great area to sit on the cove, have a drink and enjoy a river breeze. But all the waste and debris that is buried in my land, along with the drain path for storm water heading to the cove, doesn’t leave too much to be desired as far having a nice baseline from which to build a pretty yard on. Even if planting a garden in glass shards and softball sized pieces of asphalt (don’t know how those random pieces got scattered about, either) would produce the best garden results in the universe, why in the world would anyone want to crawl around on their hands and knees digging in such rubbish? If that trash cut the rough dew pad off a dog, I can’t imagine what it might do to me!

The day of change came up to me during the Village Festival this year. As many residents of downtown Bluffton do each time there’s an event on Calhoun Street, I found myself policing my yard against uninvited guests trying to use our place as a convenient parking lot. One brazen festival-goer pulled all the way up into my yard and parked almost squarely on a macho fern that was struggling to survive in my trash-ridden desert.

“Excuse me,” I called as I came off the front porch.

“Yes?” the stranger replied.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But you can’t park here.”

“Why not?” the stranger pushed back.

“Uh....because you’re in my yard,” I suggested with a smidgen of frustration in my voice.

The stranger looked around and then back at me. “This is a yard?” she snorted. She sort of shrugged her shoulders as if to say, Whatever. It sure is a pitiful looking yard.

I immediately got on the phone to my friend who was building a house.

“Hello?” he answered.

“Dude, are you getting sod for your yard?”

“Yeah. We’re getting this great sod called Palmetto St. Augustine from Nimmer Turf Farms,” he began. “It’s a great grass that is low maintenance and has good...”

“Whatever. Details,” I interrupted. “Piggyback five pallets on your order from me. I’ll come over and pick them up. I’m in bad need of a yard.”

So like a lot of things in my life, I way underestimated the amount of work that would go into making a yard instantly beautiful with a few pallets of sod. But I love to try new things, and this certainly seemed like a task I could tackle. From the time I made the call to order the sod, to the time it actually showed up, I read voraciously about how to prepare for, lay, and protect my new investment. I borrowed a monster, farm-quality tiller from some friends and began my preparations in earnest. I held on and rode that tiller like a bucking bronco trying to get the hard packed dirt that was my yard to give way and become a supple receptor for my new grass. I raked out bushels upon bushes of liquor bottles, chunks of concrete and asphalt, old pieces of tin roof, even found an old, intact, glass IV bottle (would LOVE to know the story behind how that got in the yard). The night before the sod was to arrive I went to bed exhausted, but in eager anticipation, like a kid on Christmas Eve.

The sod arrived promptly on time and sat in my driveway like huge emerald cubes. I took a mat of the sod, inspected it, felt it, ran my fingers through the moist blades, smelled the fecund earth tones that were like a pheromone to me. I took that first mat and gingerly placed it in the spot that my new lawn would begin. I practically floated back to the pallets for the next piece. And the next. And the next.

Slowly but surely, my lawn was taking shape. After about an hour of placing the sod, I stepped back and took a look. It was good. I ran and got a sprinkler and immediately began watering the new grass that I put down. I looked back at the pallets.

The shock was immediate. I had not even made a dent in the pallets of sod. I looked back at the area I had completed. More shock. The area had shrunk. It had shrunk so that the sprinkler I had turned on was putting more water on dirt than grass. The romance of this project died right there.

I had chosen not to spend a few hundred extra dollars to have Nimmer’s guys come out and lay the sod for me. At two o’clock that afternoon, when I wasn’t even halfway through my 5 pallets of sod, I spoke to my friend’s wife. In what can only be described as desperation, I asked her, “How are your sod guys getting along with your sodding?”

“Oh, I forgot about that,” she said. “Yeah, they got done at about 11 this morning. The yard looks fabulous! How about yours?....Mitch? Why are you crying?”

I worked until about six that evening before I quit, not so much from exasperation, but from sheer, unadulterated exhaustion. Those first mats of sod that I put down were like playing with feathers. By two in the afternoon I was hauling cinder blocks. By the time six came around, each mat was like pulling an anvil through the yard. With another half day of work ahead of me, I went to bed and enjoyed a short dreamless night. I ran up a $400 watering bill keeping my grass alive until its roots could work their way into the concrete that lay below it.

But it’s done. My children can now go outside barefoot. My dog no longer has to bleed when she’s in the yard. The rain water that would pour into my yard from the street and down into the cove, eating its banks away, is now slowed. And people will now clearly see what is my driveway and what is my yard.

You can now see our house. Our yard has defined regions. The plants are growing. Even the brick wall that has been dubbed “The most senseless wall in Bluffton,” gained praise by one architect when he said, “Well, it makes a little sense now.” We’re getting there.

Drop by and visit. Just don’t park on the grass.