The garden I miss, living in the city (one I created)

A few years ago when I was living in the country I had the opportunity to create a garden spot on my family's land after we had cleared a tangle of dead thicket killed by Asian bittersweet vines (an invasive species, the Bush Republican of plant species: it doesn't give a shit about any other plant. It will climb up a mature tree and smother it with its own leaf cover, with vines as thick as your arm, within ten years.) This is the spot I had to work with:



I wanted to put in a veggie garden with an arbour for vines, so that winter I started designing one in my laptop using Bryce 3D (closest thing to a CAD program I had.) An architect friend suggested using white PVC pipe as a structural element, which I supplemented with light 1" x 2" wood to be painted white. The wood elements I attached to the PVC parts using zip ties, and I anchored the whole structure to the existing cedar fence with the same ties. Total cost was under $300, including galvanized bolts to fasten the wood parts together. (Always buy galvanized at a marine hardware store for things that will be outdoors in a coastal climate.)


I accomodated an existing young maple tree I wanted to leave for the next generation:


Here is the way I used the PVC pipe parts and related the wood structure to the PVC section:



I did some animated renders of the garden structures:

(iPod formatted movie)
(Windows Media Format)

So I had a clear idea what it would look like even before I went to buy the materials.

Here's what it looked like in situ about 15 months after I built it and planted everything (including a wildflower garden outside the veggie garden):