My house! It came with squirrels!

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.

Testing their strength

In the hour between getting off work and twilight, I went out to the back 40* and pruned one of the compost bins (pics later, but it's a wire enclosure with a full pelt of ivy). I wanted to clean it a bit before I put leaves in.

Then I got distracted.

I clipped ivy from the cherry tree. I clipped bits off the neighbor's cedar that's in my yard, so my tarp-o-leaves wouldn't catch when I heaved it into the bin. I clipped more ivy from the cherry tree. I ripped ivy from the cherry tree. I YANKED such that a stem as big around as my thumb detached itself for some length, and remained, hanging like a jungle vine, attached by bits twenty feet up that were out of my reach. I looked at the hanging vine and though vaguely of rapunzel.

Suddenly it seemed fitting that Agony, the Princes' song from Into the Woods, was stuck in my head.
Agony!
Beyond power of speech,
When the one thing you want
Is the only thing out of your reach.

What's so so intriguing
Or half so fatiguing
As what's out of reach?

I abandoned the ivy to test the strength of the wisteria.

Everyone else who's been to my yard has said something about how much they love wisteria. It's a beautiful plant, and the way it twines around itself is fascinating. It's also rated in Washington as "Aggressive", which means that though it's not officially categorized as "Invasive: Will choke out native forests and create a great wisteria barrens through which none dare tread", it will eat your yard, house, and pets if given half a chance. Wisteria is the plant equivalent of giant, dangerous African animals: Charismatic Mega Flora. Everyone loves it, except for the people who have it eat or trample everything they hold dear.

At my place, it had already started in on the porch roof supports.

Had.

Great masses of wisteria now lie on the cement patio. The beast is still crawling through the lilac above it, and several more battles (and a ladder) are needed to get it down to a manageable size, but it is no longer an immediate danger to the patio roof.

I think I may just be able to beat the wisteria. It's reassuring to have a task at which I might win to take my mind off of the ivy. Wisteria is mighty, but Ivy is sneaky. Ivy comes up everywhere, where you least expect it, and I can't seem to shake the sneaking suspicion that it's actually higher on the food chain than I am.

*Square feet.