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

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

I feel your pain. We have been somewhat dilatory about keeping the upper half of our back yard orderly, and this year, with all the rain, it has completely run riot. There is a titanic death struggle for territory between the blackberry and the bindweed, with occasional arabesques from the fennel. Which would be okay-ish if any of them would actually die in the death struggle. So far, not so much. This fall, I will have to rent a chipper from Home Despot and wreck some havoc. On the plus side, this gives me the excuse to try out the new chainsaw and perhaps invest in a nice 18" machete.

Or, if that doesn't work I'll need to find goats. Goats with flamethrowers.