Grown with Love and Patience The Cole Garden Garden

摘要

Peggy and Ron Cole have created a mountain woodland escape behind their house. That's quite a juxtaposition, since you can step from the back of their residential lot onto a commercial building fronting one of the busiest streets in Athens. This is one of many contrasts that add to the charm of the landscape they have built together over the decades. When Peggy and Ron bought their home in 1975 it had been rental property for 50 years. The backyard was a tangled, dark, overgrown thicket. Together they cleared brush and thinned the trees on the north-facing backyard that slopes away from the house. Leaves and branches were piled onto beds to create compost as they laid out the winding paths "to enjoy with a glass of wine and talk in the evenings." These paths now wind through a shaded woodland retreat featuring a unique collection of azaleas. Many of these azaleas were grown from 3-inch cuttings from friends and mentors that collected and bred native azaleas. It can take years of nurturing to get asmall cutting to a blooming plant, and even longer for the plants to become one of the mature specimens now enhancing the Cole garden.