The South Side of the Forest Floor is MY way. And he hasn't helped
much.
I will never be accused of being an excellent landscaper. I have
already acknowledged failure in playing Nature's game.
So as with every other problem in my world, I engineered my way through
it.
I looked at the south side of the forest floor and giving nature her due,
I'm taking a different tact. The plan is sort of if you can't beat it,
change the game your are playing.
What I wanted to do was to keep the sticker bushes and other scrappy
brush from encroaching the yard. I wanted to push it back. I really want to
avoid the screaming kids when they toss themselves off a swing and take a
rolling landing in really sharp thorns.
I wanted to hide the whole mess so no one could see the untended
overgrowth that was embarrassing.
I wanted to pretty up that side of the yard with color and whimsy.
Collapsing the equation I wanted to minimize danger, cover a mess and
make what's left look pretty.
Piece of CAKE when I looked at it like I was pretending the whole area
was inside my house! My home decorating skills are largely cosmetic. I
use soft indirect lighting to hide that the walls need painting. I use
throw rugs to cover gouges in my hard wood floor and chips out of my ceramic
tile floors. I hang stuff on the walls where someone's head
accidentally went through it and made a hole. Ditto doors. My banged
up refrigerator door has so many photo magnets that one wouldn't even think
of looking for the damage underneath.
I decided my best plan was to hide, obfuscate and disguise the trouble
area with tall decorative grass and perennials and wild flowers.
Remember those tall grasses I talked about earlier? The part about chain
sawing down tall thick decorative grasses?
pushing spring 2009
clearing.htm
After they were all cut down I started chopping them up. With an axe.
Some of those grasses were so rotund I couldn't reach my arms around them.
So I took my pink handled girly axe and cut down through the roots and ended
up with about a couple hundred for transplanting.
I asked the honey to roto-till a row along the south yard side of the
forest floor. He grudgingly helped but didn't dig up the sod first.
Sigh. I then started transplanting what was PLANNED to be 20 foot high
and 4 ft diameter decorative grass plants. The stuff grows so thick
that you can't see through it even in the winter time.
I'll admit this isn't the best of photos . This was taken immediately
after transplantation. I will look for one taken later in the year
when it surely looks better than this. I transplanted well over a
hundred deep rooted tall decorative grasses to the south and east sides of
the yard. On the south side it was to be my attempt to 'hide the mess'. The
east side is another story all together.
I later added other transplant-lings like day lilies, dahlias, Echinacea,
black eyed Susan's and darn it all if I can't find one photo from late
summer to prove it!
I claim to have won this North vs South side contest. My idea of covering
and prettying it up was described by HIM as 'so you think putting a bow on
that pig is all that is needed?" Well, yah that's what I was thinking.
So I ask you. How I was I to know to keep track of which grasses I
dug up and where I put them in proximity to the type and style of them?
It isn't my fault that some tall grasses made it into the border and so did
some shorter different kinds of decorative grass. My vision of a tall
uniform thick row of grass looks more like a toothless old crone with no
resemblence of order.
It took a good two weeks of very hard work to transplant all that grass.
If you don't believe me come on over and bring your own shovel and axe.
By the time this job was finished I was tired of the whole project. I
took the dug up day lilies, iris, corn flower, black eyed Susans and just
threw them into the dirt around the newly planted grass. I didn't even cover
them with dirt. Just threw them in with instructions to sink or swim.
So what if it looked like a psychotic jumble of mixed up flora?
My story and I'm sticking to it. My side of the yard is better because
when the kids jump off the swing into a hillside body roll, they hit flowers
and tall grass and never get to the thorn bushes hidden behind. The
'look' compliments the ummmm rustic forest-edge location and the psychotic
look is what it is, a bow on the pig.
Game - Set - Match. I win.
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