I was supposed to be down/uptown at 9:00 on Saturday, to meet a fellow gardener and do some routine weed-pulling work in the kitchen garden behind the Walker-Peters-Langdon Historic home. I can't tell you much about the house, even though I have been inside, since my previous visit was at least twenty-five years ago. I think it is the only original, or maybe earliest preserved, homestead from the founding of Columbus.
I think the W-P-L. House is owned by the city, and administered by the Historic Columbus Foundation. I don't recall, and did not peek in any windows, but suspect it is furnished in the appropriate style of the period, with mostly hand-made fabrics and furniture. It can be seen as part of a tour the Foundation offers, that also includes the building that was the original pharmacy of Mr. Pemberton, the man who developed the formula for Coca-Cola.
A group of Master Gardening people have taken over keeping the back yard. It has a little white picket fence, and gate separating the lawn from the rear of the building, and a fairly tidy garden area behind the house. I think I remember hearing that the garden had been neglected, was sadly overgrown, gone to weed and seed in recent years. And that the city had asked the county agent if she would recruit some of her 'trained' volunteers to clean it up and manage the ongoing maintenance. They did, if I recall correctly, a good bit of bushwhacking, and have tamed it into a reasonable semblance of a mid 1800's kitchen garden. With some ornamental bloomers, but mostly herbs and vegetables.
We were weeding around a nice little plot of beans, tomatoes, corn, peas, a few okra plants and two blueberry bushes. I made a comment about being such a big fan of mulching to keep weeds at bay, and got the response that people did not mulch back then! And if you think about mulch - in another culture, it would probably be considered as 'trashy' looking. Which explains why the old people were all stooped, looking bent double, from all those years of hoe-ing to keep the weeds from taking over! I pulled up about a gazillion little cherry laurel volunteers, and kept wondering where they all came from, then took a break from squatting to look up and discovered lots of cherry laurel trees hanging overhead. All it takes is one tree, and a flock of birds to have a huge problem with an invasive species...
Plus, they did not actually have 'lawns', unless the area was big enough to fence and pasture goats or cows to keep it under control. We devote so much time, energy, water, financial investment to create the perfect carpet of grass around our homes. So it's difficult to think that at one time, grass was a nusiance. Do you remember driving out in the country and seeing old houses with a neat hedge and the area between the hedge and house swept perfectly clean of all living things? No grass, no weeds, nothing. Just sand. Was it to keep pests away, or make them more visible as they were wiggling their way toward the foundation of the house that was four feet off the ground?
I have never experienced such a pestilence of mosquitos in all my life. That hour and a half of weed pulling gave me a wee taste of what it must be like to live in the tropics. The nasty little suckers were swarming and singing the whole time. It was so, so, so bad. I'd put on bug repellant before I left the house, covering my arms and legs, neck, face, ears. But they were so awful, I had to stop half way through and go back to my car for another layer of skin-so-soft. I only got several bites, which proves the Avon product works well. That was the craziest thing - I don't know if there are lots of places in the neighborhood with standing water where the stinkers are breeding/hatching, or it is because we were a block from the river - but they were Awful.
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