Our Hillside

I mentioned 2 days ago when I was talking about the Aralia elata how people really noticed it. I thought I'd put off talking about those pesky deer for a day and put up this picture. The white tree in the center is the Aralia, so you can see why people notice it. When we bought this place in the early 70s, this hillside was just a hillside, nothing else there. For awhile it was an orchard, but the fruit trees stopped bearing well, as older fruit trees do, so about a dozen years ago we started taking out the fruit trees and putting in other gardens. The large conifer on the hill were planted 30 years ago and look now like they've been here forever. People find it hard to imagine this as a cow pasture, but that was the reality. The back garden was a hog wallow and part of Lake Amanda was where the chicken house was. This was a working farm for about 100 years, the land having been given as bounty after the Civil War. Our house was built in about 1869 and the barns, not long after I expect. We have a coal mine where they got the coal to heat and cook, though it is a very thin seam, only about 6 inches think in most spots, and would be a lot more work than I'd want to do. I could go on with the history of the area, but this is a gardening blog, so I'll end here. On to deer and rabbits tomorrow.