I would like to tell you about my wildflower garden, which has become quite a hobby with me. I find it to be a most satisfying hobby, and although I have worked on it for several years, I never seem to tire of it.

The lot on which we built our house had a small creek running through the rear of it with several large shade trees growing on the bank of it. We purchased this lot because of the shade, but soon found it to be too shady to allow us to grow flowers, and since I have always been a flower lover, I immediately began to take stock of the situation and decided on wild flowers, which grow in Tennessee in abundance, and early blooming spring bulbs which do very nicely in the shade since they bloom before the leaves on the trees get very large.

The first year or two was spent in transplanting wild flowers from the woods to the bank of the creek. Most of these were transplanted in the spring while in full bloom, and with the exception of a few, they seemed to thrive. There were several redbud trees on the creek bank, and I added a dogwood and some flowering shrubs, for color.

For convenience, my brother built a footbridge across the creek and some stone steps on the far side of the creek, since that side of the yard sloped down to the creek. The steps and bridge looked so pretty, we decided to build a dry wall across the back of the lot and plant it. In order to build this wall it was necessary to pick up rocks the right size and shape, and bring them home in the back of a truck. It took quite some time to gather enough rocks to finish our wall, but when we had it about two feet high, we filled in behind it with dirt and leaf mold and found we had several feet more of space for wild flowers, ferns, and ground covers. Some of the plants were put in between the rocks in the wall, which gave a very pretty effect.

In building the wall, we set it back from the bank of the creek several feet, and in order to make it more natural looking, it was curved in places, thus making some sections of it closer to the creek than others. We left a path between the plantings on the creek bank and the wall and this was planted in grass.

In the early spring, the whole garden is a riot of color and each year it seems to be prettier than the year before. Each year a new niche or corner is added to the garden and a new variety of plant started, or older plants are divided. As for me i added some yellow mandevilla vine in every corner of the garden.

Of course the garden has to be hand weeded and because people not familiar with nature do not know what to pull up and what to leave, my mother and I do all the work in our garden. In fact all the work on the garden has been done by the family, since we brought in the rocks from the roadside and placed each one of them in the wall, as well as the dogwood, shrubs and wildflowers. I only wish more people could have a hobby as interesting as wild flower gardening.