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| We envisioned a Grove to lift your Spirit |
It started out easy enough. We have a beautiful ranch where we decided we wanted to plant a grove of trees that would last 200 years..... Thus started our journey so search out live christmas trees, rescue any orphan trees we came across that would grow in our area from the nursery sale piles and, buy en mass, any broken off problem trees on sale at the local big box stores.
We were blessed that our ranch has a unique type of old Oak Tree on it called a Blue Oak which is very long lived. So our grove would fit in nicely with established old trees that had been here over 100 years when gold miners started in California (1849).
What started as chaos eventually become a plan... but it took a while. Our simple goal the first year at the ranch was a beautiful christmas tree we could plant! A good enough goal.. but as we found out, our climate is warm and the pine trees that like the hot temp don't live long. Beautiful tall cypress (think italy, that DO like the heat) well...don't look like christmas trees. PLUS we already had lots of old vertical cypress in our historical villa gardens. So we settled on Redwoods. Which btw are a little skimpy as christmas trees . BUT they will live hundreds of years and we had a VISION....
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| You know it is a live christmas tree in a pot because it is kinda skimpy |
We have a gentle ravine above a small stock pond that longs to be transformed into a water garden some day. It has a creek and a beautiful old statue garden (long abandoned and part of the historical garden bones of the ranch) along its course. This would be where we would have a grove and eventually a woodland garden.
We are lucky there is a small amount of year round water, but this is california so we made an early decision to run a little drip line 'just in case'. The ongoing plan is to plant live Christmas Tree redwoods year after year in a grove AND up the ravine along the creek. We will also plant maples, native cherries and plums... all which have beautiful foliage, blossoms or fruit for the wild critters. As the woodland matures and where it works we will add dogwood, yellow twig willow and other complimentary plants.
At the moment....truth.... nothing is larger than 3 inches around... but we see the future...
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| To plant a tree is to embrace the future... |
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Follow the Castle Gardener. Perfecting permaculture and organic practices that are NO WORK and can be done by a farm girl with nails..