Welcome! Scroll down to view photos from the files of Martha Tate, co-executive producer of HGTV's A Gardener's Diary and longtime Home & Garden columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The photos are accompanied by Martha's timeless take on garden writing. Use Martha's photos as wallpaper - see instructions on the sidebar.
Tuesday, January 28, 2014
Nature's gift to the garden
This is an odd angle for you to see a shelf rock that juts up out of the ground and is a startling six feet high and 20 feet long. It's what I see when I look out my kitchen window. Well, not this side but the entire front of the rock.
People who come here always comment on this feature that was put here by nature. It is granite, I'm quite sure, and the only outcropping of its size around here that I know of.
If you look to the left, about midway up the photograph, you can just make out one of the three iron arches in a new garden area on the south side of the house. In front of this rock, I have four bird feeders, so I am constantly watching the antics of squirrels and chipmunks in the morning and the gathering of cardinals in late afternoon. Towhees scratch at the ground and sometimes alight on the feeders along with the chickadees, titmice (is that the plural of titmouse?), juncos, wrens, goldfinches, assorted sparrows and purple finches. Downy woodpeckers have riveted the hickory tree you see in the foreground. I have both red-bellied and red-headed woodpeckers that are partial to that tree, too.
Today, it is a dreamland here in the woods. The snow has decorated the dark green leaves of a Magnolia grandiflora (also put here by nature) which stands at the other end of the shelf rock and is the main landing point for the cardinals to survey the feeders.
I have been around the house and photographed all of my new garden spaces. They are quite lovely, but this one scene, put here entirely by nature and before I became the steward of this land, is the most beautiful of all.
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