Garden Changes By Nature

From last year, when the garden was a foot deep heap of magnolia leaves and a few japanese holly ferns, til today that little world is a different place.  It actually looks.... pretty.  Unfinished, still, but pretty.

The back garden before I owned it

Another view of the back garden before I owned it

But some of the most breathtaking changes are ones that have happened without me.   Last year when I started shoveling out dirt for garden plants, the dirt was like a dry silt, mixed with some broken concrete pieces of a project gone awry from years past.  It didn't even look like dirt.  2 healthy doses of compost manure last year, and always spending the time to amend every hole intended for a plant has lead to each shovelful this year containing worms.  You build it, and they will come.  It is amazing to me, as I don't know how they figure this stuff out so quickly?  Wormy scouts?  I mean, they don't have eyes!

Within minutes last year of planting flowering perennials, I had bees happily roaming from flower to flower, doing their life's work.  Now, I can sort of understand how they might have come across flowers in the once barren wasteland.  "Fred, you aren't gonna believe this... I was just zooming back from the Ashley sunflowers and took a small detour because there were a couple of suspicious birds, and remember that old place to the left of Ashley? The one where you accidently mistook that half buried beer can for a tulip (snicker)? Well, there's flowers all over the dang place... come on, before anyone else finds it.

"Oh come on now, Pete, I was just over there not two weeks ago... I think you need to lay off the pollen beer."

By fall of last year I was graced with butterflies and moths, had met my first two snakes, had a close encounter with a curious hummingbird, and my garden became a happening spot for carolina anoles far and wide.  Every day the lady teenaged lizards are putting on coconut oil and basking in the sun.  They sigh those lovely southern sighs as they watch the hunkie older males take down mosquitos with their strapping tongues.

Sometimes these little things take your breath away.  Its like they have come to visit me, because they like me, they really like me.   As ridiculous as this all sounds it does make me very happy to know that they wouldn't be here except for me rolling out the green carpet for them by wanting a garden.