David's Blog

Following the Yellow Brick Road - A Magical, Educational gardening Experience (3)

1st February 2007

Having made all my notes, I went out into the garden again and took stock of what was required. Sure, all the hard landscaping was there. it just needed some paintwork and planting. “This will be easy”, or so I thought. “Let’s begin at the beginning…............”.

Dorothy, an orphan, had gone to live on a farm with her Aunt Em and Uncle Henry on the Kansas prairies. The trouble was, they had to work so hard for a living that, although they loved her, they had not much free time to spend with her. Dorothy saw everything around her as being grey. The flat prairie was grey and dull, her Aunt and Uncle’s house was grey, due to the west wind and rain having stripped the paintwork off it, and even her aunt and uncle were grey, due to their hard life. The house was a simple dwelling, consisting of only one room, with a trapdoor in the floor that led to a hole in the ground, which served as a cyclone shelter…..............................................

The children’s playhouse, already in situ, would obviously be the house. I took a couple of pics and altered them into greyscale and sepia to see the effect (one of the great things about the 1939 movie is how it converted the drabness of Dorothy’s everday life into the technicolor world of her dream). Our playhouse had been painted in several colours, which had faded, and so I decided to paint the whole simply with grey exterior primer, give it a brief sand down, and leave it, as a means of depicting this greyness, and to act as a foil for the surrounding colour to follow
( Now, in July, I find that the reverse has occurred; visitors’ eyes head straight to that house,they comment on it, and then their vision pans out. The house actually stand out of its own accord and becomes a main focal point because of its dullness ( it looks great, especially when we have the striped legs wearing the Ruby Slippers sticking out from under the threshold! ). I am really pleased with this outcome because, after all, the house represents, home, family life, routine and familarity, no matter how dull we may think that is on a day-to-day basis, and which most of us (I have read) hanker after on about day 9 of a 14-night overseas holiday! I certainly can say that of our kids and ourselves. The children always ask repeatedly, “How long till we go on holiday?” By day 4 all they want is to be at home in the garden, and on arrival their mood changes dramatically. This has been the case since infancy, and so we have given up overseas holidays and are really enjoying good old British holidays where, if the weather is bad, or for whatever other reason, we can just quickly return to our familiar home comforts.

I did have one misgiving about the playhouse – its location. In the story, the house lands on the Wicked Witch of the East. Our garden is on a direct north/south axis, and the playhouse is a bit off to the left, more in the western section. I researched cyclones and tornadoes on the ‘Net, and learned that, in the northern hemisphere, they almost always travel from west to east (wasn’t it clever of Mr Baum, the author, to have the house land on the Wicked Witch of the East,?) Anyway, I quickly made some Winnie-the- Pooh (as I like to think of them) calculations and decided that the playhouse could stay put, because it didn’t matter where it was in our garden, everything on the left would be in the west, and so it would always be in the east – problem solved! And so we got down to the business of painting Dorothy’s self-styled grey home, interspersed at bath times with grass races – pulling the plug and seeing whose blade of grass went spiralling down the drain the fastest…..and in which direction. This is how we learned about whirlwinds, etc.

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