One of my goals for 2020 was to build a gate for the front of our garden patch. A double fence surrounds our vegetable garden, cut flowers, and propagation area, and thus far, this enclosure has been effective at keeping out the critters. Our current gate was a makeshift covering of bird netting that would get tripped on, ripped, and a pain to deal with when mowing. But, it worked to cover the entrance while I decided what kind of gate I wanted.
Winter is the perfect time to tackle such tasks that were pushed off during the fray of the growing season when plant cultivation took center stage. While it may sound like I was procrastinating, I was really iterating on what kind of design I wanted. I decided on the classic barn door X pattern for simplicity, low weight, and strength. As I learned in geometry class, putting a diagonal across a rectangle means that it can't sag into a parallelogram. After getting the marbled pink eastern red cedar wood from a local sawmill, Karen and I spent a warm afternoon in our garage this week building both gate doors. I was surprised how fast it went together. The first door we raised an hour before sunset, and the second we attached in the light of an early rising moon. When it was all done, I was proud to see that my measurements were right. Even the posts I sunk many moons ago and to which we attached the doors were level with the top of the gate. Seeing something that I've crafted with my mind and body manifested before me is so fulfilling.
At this point you may be thinking that this blog is shifting more toward woodworking than gardening; however, enclosures and gardening are closely connected. In Public Garden Management, Christine Flanagan writes that the words garden and yard come from geard, an Old English word that means fence. Jennifer Bartley further expands on this connection in Designing the New Kitchen Garden. She writes the Persian word pairidaeza that means "a wall enclosing a garden or an orchard" is where we get our word paradise. Even the Greeks used a version of this word (paradeisos) to describe the garden of Eden in the Bible. Gardens have long been refuges from the outside chaos of the world because of the protective barrier that surrounds them. However, the gardener still needs a way in. That is the utility of the gate, to act as a filter for what may enter and what may not.
Having a new gate is also symbolic of entering a new year. We are now in a new enclosure of 365 days to do with what we want. This starting point is as arbitrary as where I set the dimensions for my fence; however, having structure helps us as humans have order in our lives, and after a rough year, it is nice to have a fresh start with optimism for the new year.
I also hope that as we enter the new year, that we gardeners will open our gates wide for others as we welcome more people into the gardening world. Plants helped so many people get through this year with the pandemic. We are not out of the woods yet, and I believe they will be center stage again this year as we hopefully find a paradise beyond the chaos of 2020.
So, here's to a new year of gardening and accomplishing goals, even if they are right up against a deadline.