There is the garden in the plan, and there is the garden on the property record.
The first has room for a family, a hobby garden, and small plots of rye and flax. It belongs to the farmstead dream: working land gathered around a household, useful crops feeding back into bread, oil, fiber, soil, and other ordinary needs. The second garden belongs to a downtown Algoma parcel that is 26 feet wide and 0.05 acres in total, including the 1890s brick building where we live and work.
One of these gardens has acreage. The other has a courtyard behind a two-story wall, one prime 4-by-8 raised bed, and a hose whose present route runs from the basement through the studio and out the back door.
I do not think the answer is to call these the same garden.
That is the usual consolation offered to people without the land, light, money, or time they imagine: put one tomato in a pot and declare the farmstead spiritually complete. A pot can grow a good tomato. It cannot grow a field of rye, provide seclusion, or give a child room to run. A container is useful partly because it has edges. We do it no favors by pretending it contains Wisconsin.
Still, the imagined garden has a practical use before it exists. It is design information.
The garden in my head is generous with space, but space is not its only feature. It includes useful plants, long-lived plants, food, medicine, handwork, family life, some measure of self-supply, and the pleasure of a place that feels a little overgrown on purpose. Those are requirements. Once they are named, they can be tested against the place we actually own without being confused with it.
The actual place answers in constraints.
Most vegetables want at least six hours of direct sun, according to University of Wisconsin Extension. The courtyard sits north of a two-story brick building. Roughly half receives useful sun and half is shaded for much of the day. Soil, drainage, water access, mature plant size, and room to work also matter. These are not failures of imagination. They are what the design is made from.
In the farmstead version, a squash vine may take the ground it needs. In the courtyard version, horizontal sprawl is a hostile takeover. The local garden plan already contains the answer: grow upward. Hops occupy a wall. Clematis uses the iron trellis. Beans, sweet peas, small squash, and trailing plants can be considered according to the light and support available. Verticality is not acreage in disguise. It is one of the actual garden’s strengths.
The same translation works elsewhere. The imagined garden asks for perennial continuity, something planted once that returns and becomes part of the place. The storefront beds can answer with peonies, coneflowers, bee balm, asters, or other plants chosen for the real light and soil. The imagined garden asks for medicinal and culinary usefulness. Containers and the raised bed can answer with a limited number of herbs. The imagined garden asks for household loops. Seed saving and compost can begin at courtyard scale, even if rye flour cannot.
The important phrase is a limited number.
My seed library contains forty-eight varieties of medicinal and herb seed from one 2025 purchase, before counting tomatoes, peppers, peas, kale, and the rest. This is a remarkable resource and also a mild administrative threat. Astragalus, burdock, comfrey, elecampane, marshmallow, valerian, two echinaceas, two chamomiles, several basils, and forty-odd companions cannot all be assigned to one raised bed by force of enthusiasm.
The record from this spring is more useful than the catalog. Tomatoes germinated. Old pepper seed did not. Calendula, Greek basil, and Roman chamomile were started. The peppers were not restarted late out of stubbornness; the plan changed to greenhouse starts. That is a small example of the garden becoming more real when it accepts time, light, and the length of the local season.
Labor belongs in the drawing too. So does money. The planned cedar sidewalk planter has already required about $281 in lumber and casters, before soil, planting, watering, and the season of care that follows. The planter may eventually offer corn, beans, and squash to people passing Yonder, but its generosity will be built from purchased material, heavy soil, accessible water, and repeated attention. Gardens are often pictured without the person dragging the hose.
Access changes the design in another sense. The imagined farmstead is private family ground. The garden at 321 Steele meets a sidewalk, a storefront, an alley, neighbors, visitors, and city infrastructure. It can do something the farmstead garden cannot do as easily: make its usefulness public. A planter on casters, flowers along the storefront, or a courtyard used for gatherings belongs to a garden shaped by town life. That is not the lesser version. It is a different assignment.
Some requirements will fail the present-site test, and they should. Winter rye and flax belong to field space. Greater privacy requires more land. Small-scale farming requires access, soil, capital, tools, and a durable agreement about who will perform the work. The long-horizon plan treats the farmstead accordingly: not cancelled, not financed by pretending, and not allowed to compete invisibly with the building, family, career, and work already here.
This is where an imagined garden becomes valuable. If it remains only a beautiful property in the mind, every real garden can look like evidence against it. If it is read as a set of requirements, it begins to sort itself. Some desires can be built now. Some can be tested. Some belong to another piece of land and should remain there until the conditions change.
I have been starting plants in windows for roughly thirty years, following a family line through my mother, father, grandmother, and grandfather. In some years the garden was only a few pots. The continuity did not depend on mistaking those pots for a farm.
The garden I do not have can remain real without making the garden I have into a disappointment. Its job, for now, is to provide the questions. What needs full sun? What needs permanent ground? What can climb? What can return? What can be watered without running a hose through the studio? What can this household afford to build and continue tending?
That is enough to draw the next garden accurately, whether its boundary is a cedar box, a brick courtyard, or someday a field.
Sources: local Reliquary garden, property, and Yonder records; University of Wisconsin Extension on garden site selection and raised beds and containers; Penn State Extension on garden design.