I love to look at your garden. It’s so … blissful.

A young woman said this to me yesterday. She was walking her dog by my house.

I was standing on my toes, trimming the ragged top of a … what? I don’t know. I’m bad on identification. A honeysuckle tree?

The loppers cut blindly; I couldn’t see up there. Every few moments I stood back to see whether I’d gotten the tallest shoots.

Over the years I’ve sculpted this unexciting bush/tree at the edge of my front lawn. It anchors one end of my split rail fence. I’ve flattened the top and let the sides spread, and it’s become a dense respectable looking something.

Why is my garden blissful? Because I do think she found the right word. The other word a lot of people use is peaceful.

Well, it’s a green garden. Not eco-green (though with my absolute lack of chemicals I guess I get eco points); all-green-plants green (with very occasional touches of non-green). For inspiration on green gardens and what they can be, scroll through these images. And these.

You possibly think of Japanese gardens when you think of all-green gardens. My garden has stuff in common with Japanese gardens, and the peaceful, blissful vibe passersby pick up on is I think probably similar to what you feel strolling around landscapes in Kyoto, etc. (This example, however, is in Portland Oregon.)

I’ve got lawn. It’s weedy, but it’s a rich smooth calm expanse because it’s well-established and I mow it regularly. Motionless baby rabbits currently spend all day on it, eating white clover. There’s a massing in front of the house of rhododendron, viburnum, korean spice bush, butterfly bush, hydrangea (I guess I can do some identification), maybe boxwood (not sure; three large very sculptable bushes were here when we bought the house from the sons of Munro and Margaret Leaf, and I’ve planted around them). Lower down there’s hosta and liriope and vinca and ferns and ivies.

Our lot is very wide. On the other side of the lawn I planted pachysandra five or so years ago, and it’s now thick and beautiful. Looks sort of like this. Halfway submerged in it are our topiary bulls – an homage to the author of Ferdinand the Bull, who lived in our house. They look sort of like this, since we stuff them with moss rather than plant things on them. Even so, the pachysandra always makes its way up into the bulls. I snip the plants off. I prefer the way the bulls look mossed.

Whenever I see the word sphagnum on my bag of moss, I think of Cecilia Bartoli singing Rossini’s “Canzonetta spagnuola” — in my fevered mind, there’s some connection between spagnuola and sphagnum.

What else? Out front again, black river stones lie beneath another edge of the fence. I planted some small light green grasses in among them a couple of years ago, and they’ve come up well.

I like the combination of black and green. I could look at kiwi fruit all day.

The bulls are not my only non-organic element. In the middle of the lawn sit two brown butterfly chairs (our house looks very ‘fifties modern, so this seemed the right way to go), and between them, on a black metal stand, there’s a luxuriant yellow coreopsis spilling out of its (yes) black container. The only negative here, I’ve discovered, is that our many birds enjoy the plant so much that they congregate, and shit copiously, on the butterfly canvas.

Speaking of birds and rabbits – Anyone who reads this blog knows that UD‘s garden attracts insane amounts and varieties of wildlife. I chronicle the more dramatic viewings (hawks, a mink, big effing snakes) in these pages, and I inevitably feature more than anything else the ongoing surreal drama of ever-increasing deer families everywhere. I mean, they live on our property, behind the house, high up in the woods, and they’re just always here. But there are also hooting owls and barking foxes at midnight, and an orange cat who tries to kill all the birds, and turtles and voles and once I found a dead rat. Racoons and opossums go without saying.

Hovering threateningly above all of this are the trees. Very old, very big, very everywhere trees. Parts of them are always falling, especially during the violent summer storms. Right now a haul-away job awaits UD in the very thick of her woods, where, two nights ago, a bunch of pretty big branches came crashing down.

But anyway. The point is blissful. The point is peaceful. In sun and calm weather the trees benignly shelter UD’s carefully clipped, carefully planted green swathe. From a low-hanging branch she’s hung wind chimes she got in Bali, so there’s the pleasant low click of the cylinders in counterpoint with the wood thrush.

I think the blissful peaceful feeling comes ultimately from the ‘total world’ effect of all this green. There’s very little traffic, so it’s quiet; and the houses in every direction are, like this one, swathed in green. The houses are small, so none competes with the natural setting. I think at the moment all those soft silent rabbits in particular account for the way-Henri Rousseau feel of the place.