Evolution of a garden

It is fall, the time I start looking back at pictures, evaluating how the garden did this year, and think about what I want to do next. I've been thinking about my front garden.
Three years ago I bought my house. The day I closed I signed the papers, got my key, drove to the house, and planted crocuses. Sure, there was a window missing and a pile of raccoon feces upstairs, but crocuses come first. One has to have priorities.

We worked in the interior all winter, and come spring, I started on the outside.

One year in, the house has been painted, and gardens are starting.

Every spring I'm glad I put a priority on crocuses.

And come summer, things begin to fill in.

This is, strangely enough, the longest I've gardened in any once place since I moved out a decade ago. I've loved coaxing this garden into being, and am looking forward to helping it continue to grow and mature!

Growing a bit of ancient history.

One of the reasons I love gardening is for the connection to history. My personal history of grandparents who gardened, but also the greater human history, those early gardeners who first realized they could take a bit of ground and make it into something called a garden. That is why, this spring, I planted these seeds.

You all know the seeds on the right. It is corn, of course, known scientifically as Zea mays. On the left we have... Zea mays, only this one goes about under the common name teosinte, and is the wild Mexican grass that Native American farmers started with to breed the corn we know today. When I requested these seeds, I knew they would look different, but I never expected it would be so dramatic!

This is them in my garden (please forgive the lousy picture) Teosinte on the left, again, with more stems, and looking more like a typical grass than the thick, single stem of the corn on the right.

And now, as summer winds down, my teosinte is beginning to make ears. Here they are:

I can't quite wrap my head around this. That little stack of seeds, those few brown silks... THAT was transformed by prehistoric gardeners, with no knowledge of genetics, into the huge beefy ears of corn with all its colors and shapes and sizes that we know today. Surely the greatest plant breeder the world has ever seen was some native American whose name we will never know.

Teosinte isn't particularly attractive, or edible, but I'm very glad I grew it this year. It makes me really take a moment to think about -- and be thankful for -- the amazing gardeners who created the plants that feed our world today.

Time Travel

My mom is super-human in many ways. An example being, when each of us was born she started a journal for us -- she wrote in it when we were small, when we learned to talk, we'd dictate to her, and when we learned to write, we took over. If this doesn't seem superhuman, bear in mind: my Mom did this for all 5 children she gave birth to in the course of 6 years, while also doing things like keeping us fed with homemade bread and being generally being amazing.

Which is all just back story to explain why I have a huge box of notebooks in which are recorded my entire life. I stumbled on the box the other day, start flipping through that first notebook, and found this entry from when I was 5 years old:

8 August 1988

My flowers are growing well. The sweet peas are the tallest and the portulaca are the smallest. The marigolds are in between.

Yep. Already gardening. Not much has changed, only I know now not to try and grow sweet peas in August in Maryland (where we lived at the time).
And it sort of came out of no where. Gardening is not one of my mother's many super powers, though she often tried. With results as indicated by the rest of my entry for that day:

Mom's strawberry patch grew 5 strawberries