Construction News

My back yard. Click here for all the gardening posts. Link opens in this window.

A neglected strip of land, 50′ wide and 170′ long, oriented with the house at the south end, facing Ahr Street in Atlanta. Since the ’20s the back yard’s been a gravel drive and parking lot. The whole east side of the lot was a coal bin and trash midden for many years.

When construction started I realized it was possible to change things, and so I’ve embarked on a mission to terraform the back yard into a place where whatever grows is welcome, and in abundance. Now and then I get a little money and in goes a mess of plants or a tree. I love my garden.

Of course, it’s only ever been a neglected backyard with a gravel driveway and a bunch of weeds, and it’s only that now. But I can sit back there in my green wicker chair and see it all as it will be in ten years, thirty-five years, whatever. Long after I’m dead, anyway.

I can see how it used to be, also, as a delivery alley up to the ’50s, with the washing hanging down the back on a line and a stinking pile of broken crockery and glass and other things long since washed away or turned ito dirt. And from the ’20s, the view from the back yard was a strip of industrial land lining Bissey Street, which is nothing but industrial land.

Now, the view is a seven storey steel and concrete shell with a big fucking crane sitting right back behind us, hitting my pecan tree’s limbs every time it swings around to take something off a flatbed and lift it to the roof. But that’s another page.