You Go To War With The Yard You Have, And Tend To It Like The Meth Addict You Are
The thing about fixing up a yard is that there's a high rate of success — or at least you can't screw up anything that badly. It's not like you're going to cause the house to flood or set the roof on fire or something like that. If you dig some dirt and bury some rocks, it's not a big deal: undig the dirt, move the rocks. If you kill a plant, plant another. You know?
The bad news about the backyard at Kawama was that it looked like shit — it was an overgrown mess of Rose of Sharon bushes (so mature we treat them as trees), leaves and Astroturf. The good news about the yard is that it was so crappy looking that I couldn't really screw it up.
I'm exaggerating, of course — it wasn't so bad — the Astroturf, while a puzzle to us, wasn't too hard to take out and there weren't all that many leaves. Besides, the fence was in good shape.
First thing to do was get rid of that Astroturf:
In terms of "real work," we left the yard for later, figuring that it wasn't as much of a priority as what was inside the house, but we dug up a lot of the Rose of Sharon early on — it was easy to do, and tough to stop doing once you got going. There were maybe ten separate plants in the backyard and we left five (later reduced to four).
We bundled the Rose of Sharon limbs for the Parks Department to take away. In Queens — along with Manhattan, Brooklyn and now parts of Staten Island — the Asian Longhorned Beetle has made it such that the Parks Department has to take away wood debris. They actually came to pick it up, no problem, on the day they were supposed to come:
Here's what the yard looked like in February, after a season of experimenting with tomato plants and letting it relax a little:
I ended up cutting the shit out of the Rose of Sharon — the plants that were left were still a little too unruly, so I trimmed them back before the winter:
I used some leftover chunks of rock and/or concrete to make a path to the compost bin. I realized later that it looked rather phallic — a phallic path to a compost bin, interesting, that:
The front "yard" was so overgrown that it seemed like the only responsible thing to do was cut it all back. It's interesting — I do yardwork like a meth addict but nothing seems to endear yourself to neighbors like tending to the front planter. You only have to be out there for a few minutes before the older neighbors descend on the scene of the crime to give their support; maybe they're just happy that the new people are doing anything at all.
Anyway, here's the front yard we went to war with:
Here's the front yard we finished with:
A family friend who is a "professional" "landscape architect" took a look at the "work" I did and pronounced it a lost cause. Well, what does she know anyway? I'm more determined than ever now to train, trim and prune this ragtag collection of plants. And besides, it seemed necessary to break some eggs to get into the dirt there — I pulled up several bags worth of trash, not to mention larger bits of debris: bricks, wire, a vinyl tile even. We'll see what happens in the years and decades to come.
Posted: February 14th, 2012 | Author: Scott | Filed under: The Cult Of Domesticity | Tags: "Landscape Architecture", Kawama, The Asian Longhorned Beetle