Working in the garden in the pouring rain isn’t my favorite pastime but Sunday was an exception.  Friend and fellow hort head, Richie Steffen, curator of the Elisabeth C. Miller Botanical Garden in Seattle, came down to  help us build a stumpery in our back garden. So you ask –what is a stumpery? The name infers something unsavory but this garden structure is lovely, naturalistic  hold-over from the Victorian era.  Victorians crafted stumps, driftwood, logs, rotting wood and bark into artful three dimensional garden features.  Ferns, lichens, moss and woodland perennials are planted in crevices between the logs, in rotted out or hollow spaces and around the stumpery emulating the nurse logs found in the forest.

Building one in our garden was a no-brainer.  We live in a Victorian house and have a shady, dark corner that is my gardening nemesis as nothing thrives in that area.  Stumperies are considered a Victorian oddity so it made perfect sense for us to build one in our crazy garden.

Throughout the morning we rolled logs into place, pushing them this way and that looking for the perfect arrangement. Mud flew as Richie and Fred dug holes and regraded the area so that the wood could be placed in natural looking configurations.  They used a pry bar to leverage the large logs into place–it’s all about the fulcrum.   We carved out the tops of several logs that sit upright creating planting pockets. A large rhodie slatted for demolition in our garden redo received a reprieve and is now planted behind the stumpery creating scale and context.

A stumpery in the making.

Now it’s time for me to have fun with plants.  The Hardy Plant Society of Oregon Plant Sale is next weekend.  I’ll be there early, list in hand, singing my springtime plant sale shopping song.  The advent of an irrigation system with drip emitters raises the odds that this corner can actually sustain plant life.

Tired, wet, cold and muddy we stood back at the end of the day marveling that a pile of logs and stumps morphed into a beautiful stucture in an area that for years was a horticultural wasteland.  Since the space is small think that it is more appropriate to call our new feature a stumpette.

Richie is a fernophile with a artistic eye for creating stump based configurations based on his years observing nature.