Corrales Garden Tour 2015

Adobe Dragon Kirby Garden 2015“What if they don’t like the garden? What if they hate it? They’re going to hate it. Oh, crap, why did I do this? My poor little garden!”

The demented wail of the neurotic gardener. It’s quite possible, at the moment, that my level of neurosis would make Woody Allen seem stable.

My garden, aka. the Kirby Garden, in this year’s Corrales Garden Tour, is a work in progress. The main bits of garden are completed–but no garden is ever done. Plus, there’s the perpetually not-stuccoed adobe wall, which is a patchwork of plaster, stucco netting and in few places, crumbling. The wall’s lamentable state being a function of us Kirbys being too busy with regular jobs and our little art business.

I’ve been told–repeatedly–that my garden is lovely. But I’m insecure. So my little garden’s public debut is nerve-wracking. If the garden was an actual debutante, she’d be quite pretty, but with unruly hair that refused any tame hairstyle; her clothing would be colorful but too bohemian among her sleeker, chic counterparts.

Adobe Dragon Kirby Garden 2015Unruly. Chaotic. Cottage garden. That’s the little space the hubs and I carved out in the dry desert sandhills.

It started out with the best of intentions, if “best” is defined as “tidy, everything in its place.” Color schemes were planned, flowering times coordinated.

But plants and disordered minds like mine chafe under rules. We plot bloody insurgency and would see order’s head on a plate.

Stuff died and was replaced with things with the wrong–“Oh, the horror!”–flower color. Things that actually grew well in the heat and survived the freezing temps over winter. In some cases, things that should have failed miserably, but thrived where the perfect plant died in a month. I started worrying less about design and began planting whatever the hell caught my eye in the nursery. “Ooo! That’s pretty. Cha-ching! Buy!”

And feeble order gave way to chaos. Yeah, go Team Chaos!

Adobe Dragon Kirby Garden 2015By June, the garden’s heyday, before the blistering summer heat beats most things into wilted submission, it’s a mess of riotous color. Color schemes are a thing of the past, but the abundant wildlife doesn’t care. The quails enjoy the bird feeder; lizards hunt for insects in the shrubbery, and the squirrels–Fucking squirrels!–snack on flowers.

 

Zombies rise from the gravel, shy dragons and gargoyles hide among flowers and Pan plays a tune on his pipe. Original metal artwork, made by my husband and I, fills niches along the garden’s walls. A little fountain gurgles in the rock garden.

It’s a garden; it’s filled with life; it’s fun.

Gnome Zombie Kirby Garden 2015Anyhoo, here’s the linky-dinky for the Corrales Garden Tour 2015. Tickets are $10 for a tour of six gardens, including mine. Come out and spend a day in our lovely little community!

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