Those Who Live in Glass Houses
For years we’d realized that many’s the day in our broody coastal climate when by far the nicest place to be is inside the greenhouse. You don’t really fancy being cooped up indoors when the thrilling fingers of spring are running through the earth and animating the twigs of every tree and shrub. But a chill wind or damp clamminess may make the outdoors desirable only for vigorous activity. No, it’s in the greenhouse, where the temperature’s up and so are the seedlings, that the gardener is most satisfactorily ensconced in spring, as in fall too, or on any inclement day in between.
For the longest time we had a modest little greenhouse at our place, about three by almost four metres, attached to the house. Fashioned from stout 4×4 red cedar pieces supporting large sheets of tempered glass, like everything else around here it was constructed under the watchful eye of Parsimony. The structural members were milled from cedar logs on the property and the water-stained glass sheets cost five bucks apiece. The floor was composed of thick chunks of concrete-and-aggregate paving that used to be a neighbour’s front path and made a dandy heat sink in the glass house. Total cost: about two hundred dollars—less than what we subsequently paid for a made-in-China flimsy tubular metal and plastic greenhouse that we move around the veggie patch.
That old greenhouse had served us faithfully for three decades, but its time was done. After thirty winters of exposure to moisture, the cedar sills were rotting badly and the glass panes tending to rattle ominously in the wind. As well, certain design flaws were no longer tolerable. For instance, in our budget-driven construction phase, I had decided to “make do” with a primitive ventilation system on the roof, fashioned from a pair of old wooden frame windows that could be raised or lowered from inside via an attached pole. As with democracy, the price for this system was constant vigilance. Any rapid change in temperature in either direction involved being on hand to open or close the vents.
Finally tiring of this constant flirtation with disaster, I actually went so far as to purchase one of those automatic ventilator control thingamabobs about fifteen years ago, but never quite got around to installing it. The inadequate roof vents required leaving doors and windows open during extremely hot weather. Notwithstanding preventative measures, hummingbirds, butterflies, dragonflies, robins and other fauna insisted upon entering the greenhouse and then fluttering hopelessly against the south-facing glass in which there were no openings for escape. The ongoing catch-and-release program necessitated by these intruders went hand in hand with the regimes of manual vent opening and closing, the two gobbling up absurd amounts of my time.
But, most pressingly, the glass house was always a tad too small for our purposes, a fact that my old dad had pointed out shortly after we’d constructed it. “Needs to be twice that size,” he’d said, without being asked. (What’s particularly aggravating about unsolicited advice from old dads is that it so frequently turns out to be correct.) In fact, the greenhouse, for all its shortcomings, was more or less adequate for horticultural purposes—germinating seeds, growing tomatoes and basil, and overwintering half-hardy ornamentals. What it lacked—and this would never have occurred to my old-school workaholic dad—was sufficient room for a pair of comfortable chairs, a reading light and perhaps a little bistro-style table at which one could take tea while keeping an eye on the garden.
Thus, one bright autumn day—when I was mere months beyond major surgery and should by rights have been lolling in delicious indolence—we set about knocking down the old greenhouse in order to replace it with one twice as large. Not finding anything in the marketplace that fit our needs and budget, we decided to once again build our own, with construction help from an accomplished carpenter and friend. I won’t belabour the chores involved—sledgehammering the old concrete apart, designing a building to suit our purposes, crawling around sawmill yards for lumber and demolition yards for patio doors, figuring out where waterlines and electrical lines should run, and all the rest.
For walls, we reused all the tempered glass sheets from the old house, along with three sets of single-pane patio doors, leaving enough cash on hand to afford twin-layer polycarbonate roofing, which both moderates the interior temperature and does away with the condensation drips of glass roofing.
In for a penny, in for a pound, we elected to also tear out the adjacent sunken Mediterranean garden, fill the space with twenty-five cubic yards of pit run, every cubic inch of which had to be barrowed in, and lay pavers across the whole expanse. The rationale for this retrofit involved advancing age and the requirement to begin eliminating unnecessary steps and providing flatter, safer surfaces than the sandstone pavers and steps had done. Gardeners generally, and compulsive makeover people particularly, have a remarkable facility for justifying why a perfectly settled piece of landscape needs to be torn apart and put back together differently.
Anyway, out came some lovely old lavender and sage plants; out came two beautifully globular variegated boxwoods, planted long ago. Out came small carpets of creeping thymes. Most impressively of all, out came the several dozen sandstone pieces that we’d hauled in by hand thirty years ago and now were hauling back out again, amazed at how much weight the stones, like certain acquaintances, had put on during the interim. Partway through the greenhouse project, it occurred to us that the view from the solarium-in-the-making would be immeasurably enhanced if we were to construct a stone round tower connected to the terraced walls on the hillside opposite. Thus all the sandstone pieces extracted from the former Mediterranean garden were hauled over by wheelbarrow and reformatted into a stumpy round tower, vaguely but satisfyingly evocative of the redoubtable round towers of Ireland.
Ah, but this is a story of great labours that concludes most happily. Half the new glass house now serves the gardens, with a germination chamber for early seedlings and growing trays of mesclun mix in very early spring. Tomatoes, bell peppers, aubergines and basil fill the whole space during the summer. Parsley and kale for salads grow through winter alongside tender ornamentals brought indoors during the coldest weather. The automatic vent opener, finally put to use, along with an exhaust fan on thermostat control, makes the old days of manual vent operation a quaintly anachronistic memory.
True to our original vision, the other half serves as a solarium, with comfortable seating for leisurely reading on a Sunday afternoon and a far-infrared sauna to provide a cocoon of warmth and fine music after grisly winter workdays outdoors. The bed was an afterthought. We’d imagined it might perhaps serve for spring and autumn sleep, but a few nights in that charmed space quickly expanded the vision, and in fact we’re now out there on all but the vilest winter nights. It’s a splendid place for sleeping, with the gardens spread out before us, perchance moonlight spilling across them. As though one were slumbering beneath the trees, dreaming in greenery, awakening among grasses and flowers. It’s become a place of unaccustomed comfort and idleness right within the garden itself, and, goodness knows, chore-laden gardeners deserve a bit of both.
CONTRAPTUAL NEGOTIATIONS
Farewell, Ancient Shredder
The genuine satisfactions of gardening essentially derive from ensuring that moments of delight, and of occasional rapture, outnumber instances of loss and grief. As my earlier kvetching about sapsuckers attempted to illustrate, there is no shortage of misfortune in a garden. This past spring a favourite lilac shrub—whose scented blossoms had graced our yard for almost twenty years—suddenly lost heart and died just as she was about to bloom again. Accustomed to the arbitrariness of life and death, the gardener accepts such setbacks for what they are and, in the words of disgraced public figures, strives to “go forward.”
But certain reversals cast a wider and more complicated pall. Such seemed to be the case for me when our golden age of shredding crashed to an abrupt and unexpected close. For the previous fifteen years or so, I’d enjoyed a charmed run of being able to dice up bulky garden debris —brittle fireweed and Jerusalem artichoke stalks, prickly raspberry canes, the floppy stems of foxgloves, delphiniums, summer phlox and all the rest—in a shredder. We had acquired this marvellous machine, after lengthy negotiations, from an inventive old gentleman in Victoria who had fashioned it in his backyard from steel plate. Painted fire-engine red and powered by a gasoline