moving on

Fountain at TMH

When I moved to a new house a year and a half ago, it was goodbye to Casa Coniglio. I had just gotten the garden to about where I wanted it to be (a garden is NEVER “finished”), and I had assembled a collection of my favorite plants, some of which were collections of my own seed-grown plants, or hybrids, such as Echinocereus triglochidiatus (Claret Cup Cactus), which I grew from a packet of seeds from Plants of the Southwest, and were just becoming large enough to have a good display of flowers.  It should have been no surprise to me that I fell into a funk when I moved to The Modern House, which has none of my choice plants. It does have a much larger garden space (0.45 acre, which might not seem like that much to some people, but compared to my previous 0.16 acre, it is luxurious). Most of the last 18 months has been working on fixing broken things such as repairing damaged walls, repainting, fixing the heating system and plumbing fixtures. The garden is slowly moving along, after having removed a number of dead and dying trees. Anything new requires first the removal of the old. I’m finally starting to get in some plants that I like. But Casa Coniglio is now long gone, and now I’m working on The Modern House Garden (TMHG).

We call it The Modern House because of the dozens of houses we looked at in this land of Pueblo-style homes and Territorial style homes, this house had distinctly modern features. It certainly is not modern as you would imagine Modern style, and it is far from being as Modern as other houses in this neighborhood. It does not have steel doors and aluminum window frames for example (not that a modern house has to have these, but it is something that I think of). If this house were in Los Angeles, it would be considered an adobe, or maybe a modernistic adobe. But for identification purposes, we called it The Modern House during our house hunt, and now I can’t think of it as anything else. Perhaps I should call it The Semi-Modern House, or The Modern Adobe House. But no, TMH it remains.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about my blog. To start a new one or not? Do I still need a garden log? I have iPhoto. Is it still useful for me? Is it still useful for others? Can I still use it to help expand the gardening consciousness of New Mexico? Is TMH useful to investigate this? Maybe, maybe not. We’ll see.