Click "+ Add to Map" on any card below to drop it on the map, then drag it into place. Click a placed item to move, resize, or delete it.
Teejop — the Land of the Four Lakes · Madison, Wisconsin
This ground sits on the terminal moraine of the Green Bay Lobe, the farthest reach of the last glacier, which ground down out of the north, stalled here, and melted back some fifteen thousand years ago. It left the hills, the kettles, and the boulders I garden with and around: erratics carried hundreds of miles and set down like the ice meant to decorate. A short walk west it never reached at all, the Driftless Area, older and unsmoothed.
A little road construction revealed to me the wealth that sleeps below, and I have since leveraged the fulcrum and other simple machines to place (sounds easier than it was), these boulders with intention.
Before the plow this was oak savanna, scattered bur oaks standing over tall-grass prairie, kept open by fire. My own Burr Oak is a small inheritance of that lost country. As Aldo Leopold, one of the fathers of conservation recognized, the mature oaks are armored by cork-ish bark that protects and emboldens them against the prairie fires that regenerate these lands. And it is the oak that feeds the critters which feed the critters… And the height of these grasses, the six-foot-tall Chicory and Sea Holly and Milkweed and Aster are gladiator-like proof, that prairie, as simple and serene as it sounds, is a cut-throat battle for the attention of the sun, the water, and the pollinators.
And the water. Madison rests on an isthmus between the lakes the Ho-Chunk (Hoocąk) call Teejop, the Four Lakes. The lakes were ironically renamed by white dude city planners to “sound” indigenous; now called Mendota, Monona (which I live ~3 blocks away from), Waubesa, and Kegonsa. People have lived and gathered along these shores for at least twelve thousand years. I am a recent and grateful guest, and this garden is my small attempt to pay attention to all of it.
“Never have I appreciated nature as I have in this place. I have enthused over Colorado’s mountains and Arizona’s deserts… but never have I felt the real story of nature as I have this summer… and this country is full of ‘restraints.’ Everything lies in subtleties, everything is so gentle and simple, so unaffected.”— N. C. Wyeth
“Gardening requires a lot of water — most of it in the form of perspiration.”— Lou Erickson
“My garden is my most beautiful masterpiece and my most expensive mistake.”— inspired by Claude Monet
“All gardeners live in beautiful times, because they are always living in the future.”— Sydney Smith
“A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for how to grow in rows.”— Doug Larson
William Carlos Williams · first published untitled as “XXII” in Spring and All, 1923
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens
Ada Limón
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees that really gets to me. When all the shock of white and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath, the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all. From The Carrying by Ada Limón (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2018). Copyright © 2018 by Ada Limón.
Enter the garden and click on a plant or boulder in the map for more information. Scroll below the map for all the garden inhabitants.
Your sketch, faded, as the base map. Drag cards onto it, place them exactly where you want, then resize or move any time.