This is what I accomplished yesterday: I hauled a mountain of semi-composted leaves, bark, and soil and spread it in a thick layer over the chaos of tree roots, invasive weeds, and embedded stones that forms the wild mess of the Hill Country. This rough coat will suppress weeds while gradually breaking down into soil, and will serve as the underlayer for a load of fresh soil that I'll spread on top. By next weekend (if the soil arrives this week) I will have this area planted with bee balm, coneflowers, and sedum.

As you can sort of glimpse, the new section joins two already-under-reclamation areas: in the distance a bed of iris and lilies; in the foreground, creeping phlox and ornamental grass. There's also a hard-to-see arch with roses and an odd little stone stairway in the middle of all this mess, which I cleaned up and planted with creeping thyme. I'll take another picture for you later today and add it to this post.

The Hill Country is a peculiar place. Somebody, once, spent a lot of time cultivating it--installing that rose arch, constructing that granite stair--and then the place went all to hell. Nobody's cared about it for decades, and horrible black swallow-wort and other such unsavory weeds have run rampant. Since we've moved here, I've done nothing but chop the growth with a trimmer, basically just keeping the slope neat-ish and not letting the weeds go to seed. The Hill Country had to wait its turn.

In the annals of landscape reclamation, each year's batch of fallen maple leaves has gone to a different project: first the beds along the backyard fence, then the lily and iris bed. Now, finally, the Hill Country mess is having its turn. Garden creation is a very slow task, unless one can afford to pay for materials and labor. In Harmony I figured out that a rough underlayer (there, it was usually semi-rotted hay and goat manure, but also sometimes sawdust) can do two jobs at once: mulch and enrich. Here, all I have in quantity are maple leaves, but they work too. Next fall's pile will go toward a new hosta bed in the shady Shed Patch.

This morning my hips and back are stiff and weary. Still, I'm proud to prove that I can shovel, fork, lug, and spread for 6 hours straight, even if I am 55 years old. I've always been clumsy and bad at sports, but I still make a pretty good mule.