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The Garden At Connie's Corner
Constance R. Pottenger

The Incompetent Gardener!

Few things have ever passed me by without some opportunity for successful achievement. Gardening just hasn't been one of them.  Until recently that is.

In 1954 I was first born to a middle income western Pennsylvania town dwelling young couple.  My mom did all the family gardening in all the years I've known her. 

I married my high school sweetheart who had grown up and educated in a family business called Pottenger Nursery and Landscape Company.    Ever hear the story about the cobbler's children?   Apply the same analogy for the landscaper's wife. 

Our home properties have always been neat, tidy, and well trimmed.  Not much flourish, flowers or ornamental details.  It is as if the honey in my life wanted low maintenance and not backbreaking labor at home. What he does at work is a different story.

In 2005 I was diagnosed with breast cancer and my husband and granddaughter built me a container garden on my back deck.   At the time we lived in heavily forested ground and every attempt to plant anything was just a massive failure.   My deck was perched up a good two stories off the ground.  All I had to do was get the squirrels gone.  We planted pure indulgence on that deck container garden.

The purpose of this deck garden was to pull myself out of my illness and give me something to do that was both easy and satisfying.  It got me outside every day.  I slopped in water with a hose which is very healthy for middle aged adult women.   I puttered about as expected and developed addictions to lavender, rosemary and arugala lettuce.  

In 2006 my reward for surviving 2005 was a move to a five acre hilltop property with a mix of open space (uptop-outback), two stocked fish ponds, at least three acres of dense forest and of course the ‘boggy bottom’.   We named our new to us home Chickadee Hill.   Not far from Gnaw Bone, can't miss it if you look really hard and drive slowly.  The photo on the left is me, cutting one of the open acres with a 1950's vintage push mower!  Great exercise if not perfectly cut grass. The honey follows behind me on a riding lawn mower.  I have a picture of that someplace.  He thinks he is cute!

Our first spring on Chickadee Hill was mostly awestruck wonderment.  We found seven large professionally landscaped but very overgrown and untended garden spots.  

That year we allowed everything to grow as it had in past few years.  I really just wanted to see what was there and what wasn't supposed to be somewhere else.

One day I called my mom and told her that for the first time in my 52 yrs of life, my house was filled with fresh flowers that I had cut my very own self.  I think that choked her up a little bit.  For the most part of that spring and summer I never had a day without flowers.   I even bought some new vases and everything!

I am surrounded by family and friends who are fully trained and certified master gardeners.  One by one I invited them to visit.  Out of the bunch of them I heard the following comments:  "Oh my!"; "Hmmmmm!" ; "Lotta work needed here";  "That's a weed. Dig it out.";  "That's a flower. Don't dig that out";   "You've got moles! Get a cat"; "That's a snake skin. Get a Cat";  And interestingly there were several exclamations in various forms of the phrase "Wholey Poop what a mess!"

The most important observation?

"That's a rat.  Get a cat.",  I did. 

This is Puff who bonded very well with granddaughter #2.  Puff's mother, Princess, is not such an easy going kitty.  However, as a mole, snake, rat and rodent killer, she is worth three times her weight in gold!

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