The Secret Lives of Side Yards

After enough years of caring for gardens, you develop an unexpected appreciation for side yards.

They are strange little places. Not quite a garden. Not quite a path. More of a narrow diplomatic zone between the house and the fence where everyone has agreed not to ask too many questions.

The front garden knows exactly what it is. It has an entrance. It has curb appeal. It has plants chosen specifically because other people might see them. The back garden has a social life. There are chairs, a table, perhaps a barbecue. Someone has spent actual money on outdoor cushions and will spend much of September forgetting to bring them inside when it’s rainy again.

The side yard has none of these pressures. The side yard is busy.

Often it is four feet wide, receives eleven minutes of direct sunlight sometime around May 14th, and contains a gate apparently designed by someone who had heard of wheelbarrows but never actually seen one.

Homeowners nearly always apologize before taking us down there. “Sorry about the side yard.”

Please.

You do not need to apologize for a side yard to your gardeners. We know what’s coming. There will be pots. There will be a leftover pavers. There will be a plant that is not technically planted but has been in the same location long enough to receive mail. There may be a ladder. There is almost certainly something leaning against something else.

This is all perfectly normal.

In fact, when someone opens a side gate and everything is beautifully organized, we become suspicious. Where are the seventeen black nursery pots? Where is the half bag of soil? Where is the thing nobody can throw away because “we might use that”?

What have you done with the side yard?

Professional gardeners understand the phrase “we might use that.” We live by it.

Three leftover pavers are not three leftover pavers. They are three pavers you will desperately need approximately forty-eight hours after deciding to get rid of them. A piece of lumber is never simply a piece of lumber. It is a good piece of lumber.

That is the difference.

Nobody knows what makes it good. But everyone agrees we should keep it.

And then there are the gates.

Side-yard gates are almost never simply opened. They are negotiated. Some need lifting slightly before pulling. Others need pushing while lifting the latch and applying gentle pressure with one knee. There are gates that require a little kick at the bottom, which homeowners demonstrate with the casual expertise of someone opening a safe.

“It sticks a bit. Just lift it and sort of...”

They make a movement. You make the same movement. Nothing happens.

“No, sort of toward you.”

Suddenly it opens.

Nobody knows why.

Congratulations, you’ve been accepted into the side yard.

Once inside, the side yard reveals another of its peculiar talents: making it unnecessarily difficult to move anything from the front of a property to the back. There will be a downspout precisely at wheelbarrow-handle height. A utility meter will protrude exactly far enough to catch a jacket. A shrub planted fifteen years ago has decided half the path belongs to it now.

This is why gardeners can carry a wheelbarrow sideways while ducking under a camellia and opening a gate with one foot. Nobody teaches us this. It just happens.

The funny thing is that side yards are often the hardest-working part of the property. Everything passes through them: mulch, sometimes wheelbarrows, gardeners, children, dogs, Christmas trees on their way out and new plants on their way in.

It’s less a garden than a busy hallway that occasionally grows hydrangeas.

And the plants that do grow there are often having an absolutely marvelous time.

This is mildly irritating.

A fern behind the recycling bins, watered exclusively by weather and good fortune, will be magnificent. Twenty feet away, a shrub that has received compost, irrigation, careful pruning and the concerned attention of several adults will look as though it has recently received some difficult news.

Gardens like to keep everyone humble.

Side yards appear to have taken this on as a personal responsibility.

Every now and then, though, you open one of those impossible gates and find something genuinely wonderful. An old camellia arches over the path. Moss has softened the paving. Ferns have appeared exactly where you would have planted them if you’d had the nerve. For twenty minutes in the afternoon the light comes through just right, and suddenly this funny little strip beside the house is showing off.

Naturally, nobody planned any of it.

Which may be the final indignity.

Because the front garden had a plan. The back garden had a plan. There were drawings. Plant lists. Trips to the nursery. Discussions about color and texture and whether that corner needed something evergreen.

Meanwhile, down the side of the house, nobody was paying attention and the ferns quietly knocked it out of the park.

Which is wonderfully annoying.

Because apparently the recipe for a beautiful garden was not the drawings, the plant lists, the careful spacing or the three separate conversations about whether something needed moving six inches to the left.

It was terrible light, benign neglect and a sticky gate.

Good to know.

Maybe that’s why gardeners have such a soft spot for side yards. They’re unpredictable, slightly awkward, occasionally ridiculous and, every so often, for reasons nobody can quite explain, absolutely beautiful.

Which is gardening, really.

Just narrower.