By Joel M. Lerner
Saturday, September 2, 2006
It all started innocuously enough. We noticed an erosion rill in our side yard. No big deal, right? Just need to repair the turf.
As every gardener knows, though, tasks snowball, with one little job leading to major changes.
Because we stay so busy with other people's projects, our garden suffered from what we had always considered benign neglect. It turned out, however, that our erosion repair was insignificant compared with the other issues we faced. Our garden was out of control.
The back yard, a sloping woodland garden with magnificent white oaks and hickories, had become a collection of invasive trees, shrubs and vines covering our forest floor. They included burning bush euonymus ( E. alatus ), English ivy, porcelainberry ( Ampelopsis brevipedunculata ), wisteria, amur honeysuckle ( Lonicera maackii ), a grove of Norway maples, and other invasive alien plants. Two deer took up residence last year. This summer they became a family of five, living just yards from the house.
The front beds, with sunny orientation, were overrun with weeds. The weeds caused us to lose irises, plumbago ( Ceratostigma plumbaginoides ), gaillardia, phlox, echinacea and salvia. They had been maturing beautifully until we let them take care of themselves.
A pair of Foster hollies that earlier owners had planted too close to the front corners of the house were kept in bounds by regular renewal pruning. But, in two years, they shot up 10 feet taller than the eaves of the house and were threatening our roof gutters.
Then, the woodpeckers found us. They were using the cover of our overgrown hollies to peck our wooden siding. It was clear that by letting trees and shrubs grow so close to the house we were encouraging these birds. They were relentless. I knew that the only way to discourage them now that they had gone to work on our house was with wood putty to fill their holes and a couple of coats of fresh paint to keep them from finding our walls so tasty.
Turning toward the area that had been our vegetable and herb garden for the past 14 years, we learned what a lack of cultivation for one season had wrought. This year we decided to plant vegetables in containers and let the garden go fallow.
Without a cover crop or mulch to control the weeds, though, gardens don't go fallow. Instead, the fertile, unmanaged soil encouraged weeds to take over the space. Crabgrass, porcelainberry, wormwood ( Artemisia ), purslane, knotweed, plantain, Bermuda grass, oxalis and numerous other weeds took hold to fill the void in one season. The only plants to survive the weed invasion were culinary sage, lemon balm, oregano, walking onions ( Allium cepa ) and two hardy kiwi vines, a male and a female ( Actinidia arguta ).
And that erosion rill? The coral bark Japanese maple ( Acer palmatum "Sango Kaku") and longstalk hollies ( Ilex pedunculo sa) in the side yard had gotten so big they were shading what was formerly a sunny location, causing the turf to die and leave bare soil that eroded a little more with each rainfall. This made ground cover crucial to stopping the cutting action of the water.
This was when we realized that drastic measures were needed and moved to renew the entire garden. We were distracted, just for a season or so, and before we knew it, nature had taken control. Each issue taken individually and addressed in a timely manner would not have required much effort, but an un-nurtured site over a year or two presented Herculean tasks.
It took more than 100 hours of labor to whip the property into shape. Most of the work was a process of starting over, which became exciting as we watched the cleanup evolve, opening up new spaces. Our minds were awash with new ideas. We thought: How about creating new garden rooms, a fern garden or a meditation garden with a bench? We already have a free-standing water feature that would work well there. Because the woodland area is sloped, dry-stack retaining walls would add an expansive feel and create level paths for strolling and planting.
This project was a blessing in disguise and reinforced the concept that we have shared with many people during our 35 years in business. Landscape design is an ongoing process, and we were running out of room to install new ideas.
Some of the changes we made were removing the kiwi vine because of its invasive tendencies and lack of fruit production, cutting down a dead cherry tree, adding a patio to increase outdoor living space and cutting about 10 to 12 feet from the tops of the hollies and shaping them to fit their space. A path of pavers was laid from the driveway to the rear, adding a touch of mystery. Pachysandra and mulch were added to both sides of the path as a ground cover to control the erosion. The grass strip along our entry drive was planted with flora that had been in containers waiting for the right site.
There are several lessons here:
· Keep up with weeding and pruning.
· Burning bush euonymus, Japanese honeysuckle, porcelainberry, wisteria and Norway maple belong on the invasive alien plant list.
· Plants don't necessarily perform the way you think they will.
· Always determine the mature size of a plant before installing it.
· Landscape maintenance involves regular attention at the right time.
We eradicated 99 percent of the euonymus and other invasive under-story plants that have become unwelcome in our wooded area.
We left the following native plants: American holly, spicebush ( Lindera benzoin ), summersweet ( Clethra alnifolia) , native arrowwood, viburnum ( V. dentatum ), dogwood and serviceberry. Many were volunteers; some were transplants. They had gotten lost and now can mature, free of competition.
There are many plants we didn't have the heart to remove, even though they aren't natives, because they have performed so beautifully in our woods. They include a star magnolia, Japanese maples, daffodils, leucojum, epimedium, pulmonaria, primula, brunnera, Japanese painted ferns, toad lily ( Tricyrtis hirta ), Lenten rose and bearsfoot hellebores, carex, rohdea, nandinas and evergreen azaleas. Many of these plants when installed in groupings have proven to be good competition for controlling English ivy. And we know from experience that deer -- at least the ones that live in our back yard -- do not browse all of these plants, with the exception of the azaleas.
The deer have also reinforced how much they love aucuba, hosta, evergreen azaleas and crab apples. They effectively destroyed many of these without the need for us to remove them.
Renewing a garden takes courage. And it calls to mind the expression, "you have to break some eggs to make an omelet." For me, it comes with the territory. For my wife, it was a traumatic experience to watch many of her nurtured plants get trampled, cut down and in some cases eradicated. Her favorites that might have been lost are a jackman clematis, Maynight salvias, hardy begonias, bath's pink dianthus, lavenders and astilbes.
Tune in next spring to learn which plants survived the soil compaction, painters' ladders, pruning and other shocks.
Joel M. Lerner is president of Environmental Design in Capitol View Park, Md. E-mail or contact him through his Web site,http://www.gardenlerner.com.
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