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A week is not really enough vacation time to move into a new house, especially when one spends three days of it in a different city for a wedding*. I have cabinets to paint and boxes to unpack and leaves to rake and, worst of all, an old appartment to clean. It's beautifully sunny out and I want to be massacring helpless plant life pruning things in the backyard.
Greg, one of my music friends, is also a landscaper, and he came over this weekend and walked around the yard with me, so I now have firm identifications on a few more plants, and tentative IDs on even more. The number of small volunteer trees I have to get rid of is almost intimidating. As a general rule I love trees, but some things just don't work, and a black walnut growing less than a foot from the patio, 8 feet from the house, up through a lilac and a wisteria, and underneath a big leaf maple -- this is one of those things that will just never work.
That's in the NE corner of the backyard. The NW is a jungle of blackberries and ivy covering undistinguishable shapes that might be old compost bins, tree stumps, trash, or long-dormant man-eating forest creatures.
The SW bit has a cherry tree (not sure if it's native, which would be mostly ornamental, or a fruit variety). The cherry tree has multiple smaller cherry tree children around the yard, but the whole cherry-flock is in need of more light and space to survive; the smaller ones I'm going to rip out. For the largest cherry, I need to rip out the leggy, straight-stemmed rhododendron that's growing up fifteen feet into the cherry's branches, and seriously trim the other rhody in front of it. I might get rid of it -- I don't like rhodies -- but I'm hesitant to tear out established plants that are doing well and have reasonable shape. Also in the SW corner is my favorite yard feature. It's dead. It might have been a rhododendron once, but now it's just a marvelously sculptural arrangement of verdant moss covered branches. I love my dead shrub.
The SE bit has a large and tangled Spirea-of-undeterminate-variety, and something that might be a native willow. It's also the only area of the backyard that gets sun all year round, so eventually I'll tear out it's grass and grow lilies and things there. The it-might-be-a-willow is a challenge -- weird and scraggly and tightly curved starting from the base. Greg pointed out a sucker that, given twenty years to grow, might help make the tree look more balanced, but I'm inclined to lop off the only truly vertical trunk and encourage it's freakishly twisted nature. It's like a monster bonsai.
Plunk in the middle of all this sits the grandfather maple. It's massive. I have been raking, oh, how I have been raking, but I love the tree.
And that's my lunch break over. Back to work.
*An awesome wedding, but still.
Greg, one of my music friends, is also a landscaper, and he came over this weekend and walked around the yard with me, so I now have firm identifications on a few more plants, and tentative IDs on even more. The number of small volunteer trees I have to get rid of is almost intimidating. As a general rule I love trees, but some things just don't work, and a black walnut growing less than a foot from the patio, 8 feet from the house, up through a lilac and a wisteria, and underneath a big leaf maple -- this is one of those things that will just never work.
That's in the NE corner of the backyard. The NW is a jungle of blackberries and ivy covering undistinguishable shapes that might be old compost bins, tree stumps, trash, or long-dormant man-eating forest creatures.
The SW bit has a cherry tree (not sure if it's native, which would be mostly ornamental, or a fruit variety). The cherry tree has multiple smaller cherry tree children around the yard, but the whole cherry-flock is in need of more light and space to survive; the smaller ones I'm going to rip out. For the largest cherry, I need to rip out the leggy, straight-stemmed rhododendron that's growing up fifteen feet into the cherry's branches, and seriously trim the other rhody in front of it. I might get rid of it -- I don't like rhodies -- but I'm hesitant to tear out established plants that are doing well and have reasonable shape. Also in the SW corner is my favorite yard feature. It's dead. It might have been a rhododendron once, but now it's just a marvelously sculptural arrangement of verdant moss covered branches. I love my dead shrub.
The SE bit has a large and tangled Spirea-of-undeterminate-variety, and something that might be a native willow. It's also the only area of the backyard that gets sun all year round, so eventually I'll tear out it's grass and grow lilies and things there. The it-might-be-a-willow is a challenge -- weird and scraggly and tightly curved starting from the base. Greg pointed out a sucker that, given twenty years to grow, might help make the tree look more balanced, but I'm inclined to lop off the only truly vertical trunk and encourage it's freakishly twisted nature. It's like a monster bonsai.
Plunk in the middle of all this sits the grandfather maple. It's massive. I have been raking, oh, how I have been raking, but I love the tree.
And that's my lunch break over. Back to work.
*An awesome wedding, but still.
