Blog Action Day: An "R" in the Garden

Even before the calendar flipped to 10/15/07, Blog Action Day had a positive effect on me. Obviously, it prompted me--along with the 15,860 other bloggers who signed up to participate--to think about the environment. I had felt compelled to put up a post explaining my reasons for joining Blog Action Day once the banner ad appeared here, and was surprised by the positive reaction it received. Many people left thoughtful comments that sent my mind swirling.

I honestly had no idea what I was going to write about here until Sunday morning, 77 hours into a crazy 85 hour work week. As I drove in to the office, my mind raced back and forth between finishing my latest garden project and finding a subject for my Blog Action Day post... until finally I realized that maybe my tired brain was trying to tell me something: My latest garden project is actually a great illustration of how the burden we put on our natural resources can be lightened just by rethinking your day-to-day approach.

Allow me to start with an explanation: When I find myself stuck in one of the conundrums of modern life I often fall back on the "Three R's" that we learned in grade school: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Reuse is my favorite "R," for several reasons. It does not involve sacrifice, and it's much more creatively challenging than tossing an item in the proper bin to be picked up, melted and reformed. Instead, I can help it be reborn as something else entirely... and I like to think that these items are as happy as I would be to have my useful life extended in such a way.

And so it is that I have an old radio cabinet in my garage, serving as my potting bench. And my wheelbarrow is an ancient but perfectly balanced tool that the elderly gentleman several doors down decided to retire in favor of a new model. My next rose, 'Buff Beauty,' will be trained against an old porch railing that I trashpicked on my way home from volleyball this spring. And so on.

My latest Reuse project involves some trashpicking, too. I was lucky enough to come across some industrial shelving that was marked for either the recycling center or the dump. Some of the shelves matched in color, but others did not and there was an assortment of sizes. I obtained permission to take the whole lot of them home with me for the "cost" of loading up myself and hauling them away.

I wasn't sure just how I would use them in the garden, but I knew I'd figure out something. I have always liked the use of industrial elements in small urban gardens. Instead of making the garden seem like an oasis in the desert, disjointed from its surroundings, it has the effect (for me) of tying the surrounding city into the garden and anchoring it with a sense of place.

I was ecstatic to see that there was enough of this wonderful, blue-enamelled rack shelving to use as a pathway in the far half of the back yard. They are too small to use to create a wide, generous pathway... but when you want visitors to take their time navigating through a garden, you don't always want a wide path. A thin path with an interesting layout and/or breaks in the materials will cause visitors to slow down, and that's just what I need here.

To inject a little more fun into the whole project, I am digging out a series of what I like to think of as "locks" because of our proximity to the old Ohio-Erie Canal. (I have walked the canal towpath many times since I arrived here in NE Ohio.) The shelves will span some of the locks like so many bright metal bridges. Water-hued plants, including groundcover sedums, silene maritima, and ajuga, will be planted in the locks to provide even more color. Small grasses like blue fescue in the "shallows" will help tie the locks in with other plants beyond the locks' edges.

From an environmental standpoint, this project is attractive in many ways:

• Instead of buying new block for a path, I'm reusing old materials.
• Instead of adding more solid surfacing to my garden, my new path will be porous and allow rainwater and runoff from the garage to percolate through the ground instead of being diverted into storm sewers.
• Lawn grass all around will be replaced with plants that will hopefully remove even more carbon monoxide from the air and provide sustenance.
• And some shelving that is old and no longer needed for its originally intended use--but is still sturdy enough to bear the weight of a human being--has found a second life.

So in the end, I get a unique, colorful path in my garden that adds a real sense of whimsy to my yard... and I get to feel good about the environmentally friendly way in which it was created. This illustrates how taking a look at any project or item with "new eyes" might result in an interesting discovery: Maybe it's not as hard as you think to do some of those "little things" for the environment that really add up... and sometimes it's even more rewarding than the "conventional" way to go about it. Sounds like a win-win situation to me!