We have finally hired professionals to do some long overdue work on our house - trust me, there will be essays, with photos, devoted to all those details. Right now, though, I want to talk about my garden.
I knew that my plants would be trampled by workmen. They were putting stucco on the house, which necessitated scaffolding, which was up for weeks, and a lot of foot traffic right next to the house. It was important enough that I was willing to sacrifice everything in the two beds next to the house. I didn't even plant my vegetable beds this year, since they're against the back of the house.
I was right - those two beds were trampled almost to oblivion. My yucca and two worse-for-wear chamomile plants survived. There's no trace of my daylilies or of my yellow and gold lantana. My lamb's ears survived, but they're pretty matted down.
I knew it was coming, so it wasn't excruciating to let go. It's sad, and I'm hoping that some roots survived to send up new shoots. If not, OK. I just planted some annuals, including portulaca, one of my favorites, so it doesn't look too naked.
I was not prepared for the wear and tear on the rest of my yard.
Before I say this, don't get me wrong. The work these men did on my home is beautiful. I am very glad; I would have the work done again if given a chance for a do-over. We're happy, the neighbors are happy, and as far as I know, the workmen are happy.
But for crying out loud, is it that tough to walk on the paths? We have a lot of gravel, since my husband and I are both allergic to grass. We also have quartzite flagstone, surrounded by pebbles. You'd think that walking on, and piling your materials on, gravel and flagstone would be easy. We're not going to whine that your lumber is killing our lawn - we don't have one.
Why, then, did wood end up in the flower bed, tossed right on top of my shrubs? SHRUBS - I mean, they're tall, they're lumpy - how convenient can it be to set your stuff on top of them? Now my shrubs are matted and broken.
I don't know what these shrubs are; they're something that tolerate poor soil and low water and produce lots of blue flowers that attract bees. I bought them because they were on end of season clearance years ago, 2 for $5. (I bought 4.) Still, I love them, and they're clearly not a walkway.
Areas that were clearly flower beds, filled with blooming things and edged in stone, became thoroughfares. I'm not talking "occasionally stepped in," I'm talking "the main walkway through the yard." My phlox are trampled into the ground.
Some of my flagstones were broken, I'm assuming while bearing the weight of the scaffold. I'm OK with that. They're not set in concrete or in any pattern, so it's easy to move them around a bit and make it look OK.
There's gobs of dripped and dropped cement all over everything, though. The workmen cleaned up a lot, I cleaned up a lot, and you can still find it in my flower beds, on my gravel and on my rocks. On the rocks is the worst - you can leave it, or you can expend considerable energy chipping it off. I'm peeling the cement and the plasticized final color coat of stucco off of my spiky yucca leaves.
Still, there is much to be happy about in my garden.
My entire theory of landscaping is to make it totally neglect proof. I'm not talking "benign neglect," I'm talking about, "I haven't even thought about you for weeks" neglect. I love masses of flowers (my favorite colors are purple, lavender, blue and white) spilling out of overcrowded beds. I love succulents, vines, veggies and trees. I do not, however, want to baby anything. I hand water once a week; it takes between 15 and 30 minutes. If something can't survive that, I don't want it.
I know that there are places where you can plant anything, and expect Mother Nature to provide all the water it needs. I do not live in one of those places. I live in the high mountain desert, with snow and low temperatures in the winter and blistering heat and lack of rain in the summer.
I have four different colors of bearded iris. I love how they look, I love how they smell, but most of all, I love that neglect makes them actually happy. I once had some in between two outbuildings, and I didn't water them for literally a year; they bloomed and multiplied happily.
In the last house my daughter rented, the landlord wanted a nice looking yard, and my daughter wanted to avoid yard work. I got permission to plant things, and put transplanted iris from my yard in her front yard. My daughter hasn't lived there for years, and the house spent more than a year vacant. We still drive by occasionally, dropping my son off at work. Now, with new owners, little remains of much of the original landscaping. The lawn is gone, the tree is gone, even some of the weeds are gone. Most of the yard is dead. The iris are thriving. Even when the house was vacant, there they were, a bigger and bigger mass, flowering like there was no tomorrow. Their exuberance makes me happy.
In my yard, we also have grapevines that we frequently have to cut back, Virginia Creeper that is spreading and raspberry bushes that are multiplying. We have fruit and shade trees. I do not water any of them, ever.
Besides the iris, I have two kinds of sedum, a succulent called "hen and chicks," something blue that I got as a hand-me-down transplant, lilies, daylilies, lamb's ears, honeysuckle, roses, a burning bush, chamomile, phlox, yucca, those shrubs, lavender, several kinds of bulbs, a butterfly bush, yarrow, some corkscrew-looking plant whose name I don't know (the tag said "donkey tails), euonymous bushes, creeping myrtle, two kinds of mums, and strawberries. All those get watered once a week. I chose most not because I adore them, but because they're tough and look great in rough conditions. (My soil, for instance, is not great.)
I did not count on my hoses being removed from my house during the stuccoing. I also did not count on having limited access to my yard, even away from the house. I am not about to try to cart out a watering can for my entire yard, even if I could reach it all. Nothing got a drop of water for over a solid month. Of course, it's summer, with temperatures in the 90s and 100s.
Everything looks great. Except for the stuff that was crushed (and I pruned those), you'd never know that anything less than ideal had happened. Even strawberries that had only been transplanted three weeks before the process began are happy. Even the crushed stuff, inclding my poor phlox, is blooming. Not every plant, but certainly every variety that's normally in bloom right now.
Success! I have mastered the neglect proof landscape! There is, alas, no trample proof landscape.
To thank everything for looking so great with no water, I watered as soon as the stucco hardened and the hoses could be reattached.
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