A garden is a lovesome thing, god wot

[carbonel]

Well, some gardens may be, but mine sure isn't. To start with, I don't really have anything that could be described as a garden. What was here when I bought the house was landscaping rather than a garden. Rock mulch (yuck), bushes, and a fake fence with some plants in it.

And it's all got away from me. The arbor vitae was used to have a buckle around it, but it broke, and now it's kind of floppy. (And I never liked arbor vitae in the first place, though I'm not sure why. I just think they're ugly.) One of the supports on the fake fence has rotted and it's falling down.

My lawn mower guy kept putting me off ("it's raining," or "it's too hot," or "I need to do a favor for a friend") and my front lawn looked a bit excessive but not too bad, so I let him do so, and just figured he would catch up later.

But I didn't notice what was going on in my backyard (because I don't spend enough time back there, obviously), and it's now a mass of thistles and something else prickly (burdock?) and other weeds and volunteer trees, and is really scary. I've hired fireopal's next-door neighbor, who's a landscaper, to try to wrestle the whole place back into shape.

She recommends taking down two trees, which is sad. I think both of them are ashes, and I could tell one of them had problems, but I hadn't realized the other one needed more than trimming.

She also says that one of the trees in my backyard, which is almost up against the fence, has to be a volunteer tree originally, because no sane person would have planted a tree there. It's over 30 feet tall (at a guess) and is therefore Not My Fault (I moved here in 2003). But until yesterday, I hadn't really thought about the fact that volunteer tree sprouts eventually turn into real trees if you don't do anything about them. I feel rather like the character in The Little Prince whose planet was taken over by baobab trees. Only not quite that dilatory.

Comments

[kaffy_r]

I love your title, and I wish my aged brain could recall from whre it comes.

Thank you for giving me the phrase "volunteer tree." I'd never before heard it; it makes the poor trees seem even more unfortunate, doesn't it? "I thought the lawn would look much nicer if it had a tree, so, well, I ... sort of dropped myself here. And grew. All on my own. Because I thought you'd like me." *awkward pause* "You don't. Well. I suppose you'll have to dig me up, then — no, no, I don't mind. My mistake. Don't bother your head about it. What? I am not crying. Trees don't cry!"

Seriously, though; good luck on taming the back yard. It's definitely the kind of thing that would have gotten away from me.

[carbonel]

The title is from a moderately twee poem by Thomas Edward Brown entitled "My Garden," which I know because I looked it up to make sure I had the line right. But I actually encountered the line first in Ian Fleming's You Only Live Twice, where the bad guy (Blofeld, IIRC) has created a garden of death to attract suicides, and James Bond makes a comment about his garden not being a lovesome thing.

I'm not a gardener, but I have friends who are, and they're the ones who taught me about volunteer trees. The landscaper said she blames rabbit poop for a lot of them. And I certainly have rabbits. Enough for hassenpfeffer, if I could do anything about them. And of course, most oak trees are the result of acorn caches abandoned by amnesiac squirrels. (I love the phrase "amnesiac squirrels.")

[kaffy_r]

Thanks for the poem information. I may actually have that in a volume somewhere.

I like the "amnesiac squirrels" phrase! (Although I'm certain the squirrels would be insulted. If they remembered to be.)