Every morning when I head out the door to work, I look at our front yard garden. It’s been a hard battle, getting flowers and plants into the ground much less making them grow. We live up in the pines, a little higher than downtown Prescott, which means it’s a few degrees colder. Plus, the ever-changing shadows from the surrounding pine trees and the chunky deposits of granite have made gardening more of an adventure than I expected.
Mike and I celebrated our ten-year Prescott anniversary this month. I remember our first night here, walking around the courthouse square and watching the sunset over Thumb Butte. We were not dressed for the weather, wearing thin t-shirts and shorts on a cool October evening, feeling just fine, the Minnesota blood keeping us warm in weather that now demands we put on a jacket and pants to go out.
When you move to a new place, you want to take some of what you loved about the old place with you. That’s why I was sure I would be able to replicate the beautiful perennial garden I had in my front yard at our previous home. When spring arrived a few months later, I was anxious to get growing. The next-door neighbor brought me a tub of horse manure to help improve the dirt, and I took a Saturday morning gardening class at Watters and thought I had Prescott all figured out.
I spread containers of purple-striped petunias, orange marigolds, and multicolored snapdragons around the front yard, dropped bags of garden soil and the bin of horse manure by the big pine, and began to dig. It didn’t take long for me to realize a garden trowel wasn’t going to cut it here. I found the shovel in the garage and tried my best to make a dent in the gravelly dirt that would reluctantly break apart if I put my full weight on the shovel. It was a struggle.
I remembered there was a pick axe somewhere in the garage. After a few swings, I had a deep enough hole to pour in some fresh soil and a plant. An hour later, I sat on the steps and rethought my plan. Maybe the yard would look better with a few pots of plants surrounding the pine tree. The tiny row of snapdragons and petunias looked nice along the sidewalk. I put the marigolds in a pot on the porch and called it a success.
Each day on the way to work, I’d admire our tiny garden as I walked past it to the car. One day, it seemed a little smaller. The petunias were missing. I looked closer and noticed a few green stems poking out at ground level where there used to be petunias. The next day, most of the snapdragons were gone. I went back to the store for more flowers and some advice on what types of critters liked petunia-snapdragon salad.
The flower battle raged for a few months, with me planting more petunias and our friendly neighborhood fauna snacking on them, until we finally accepted defeat and put in a small fence around the front yard, again with the pick axe and lots of grumbling.
A decade later, I’ve learned to build elevated garden beds and find the plants that like the cooler weather our front yard has in most places, and the scorching sun it has in others. After the monsoon rains, the scent of the smoke bush wafts through the air, or on a summer evening on the porch, the jasmine that flowers randomly throughout the year.
I still face snails, squirrels and the occasional deer nibbling my plants and hanging baskets, but I’ve learned to accept that this is the price we pay for the beauty around us each day. And while I may never be able to recreate what we left behind in our garden in Minnesota, the people we’ve met and the adventures we’ve had here have made Prescott feel like home.