Secret Garden

Couple of weeks ago, the landscaping company Scott and I work for installed a children's garden in a local mall as a marketing tool. A very expensive marketing tool. The idea was to make it look like the secret children's gardens of English formal gardening. To make a boxwood hedge, we had Scott build a 10' x 6' x 8' frame. We attached rigid styrofoam insulation panels to the frame and filled them with 5" twigs of live boxwood, (which took 6 people a WEEK to accomplish--I made Dolly's profile to spice up the mundane--can you even imagine pushing twigs into styrofoam all day long? and come back the next day and do it all over again??)

When it was finally ready to assemble, we had to put it up in the mall after it closed. We got there around 9:30 at night and began unloading the UHAUL we had rented which was full of tarps, tools, 2 x 4's, brochures, flowers, bricks for paving the inside and boxwood walls.

Unfortunately, no one thought about the fact that putting it up in the middle of the night would be too dark and the mall security guard was powerless to turn on the main lights. So I went home around 2 and grabbed 3 spot lights in our basement so we could fill the brand new dark garden with gerber daisies, miniature daffodils, pansies, ranunculus, lavender, ferns, muscari and hydrangea. We also filled it with toys, marbles, teddy bears, a sandbox and a tea table. It was quite magical! Eight hours later, we were pulling away around 5:30 in the morning...

The best part would have been going to work at 7:30 for some serious overtime that week. But we just couldn't pull ourselves together and took that next day off!

Wouldn't YOU like a children's secret garden in YOUR back forty?