Dayna's Landscaping

I dug up one clump of Karl Foerster grass from home and divided it into eleven little pieces and planted them in early summer. It kind of looks like a grain, so I thought it would look good here.  Since it's basically a shed with antique machinery, I decided the fewer plants the better.  I decided to remove the plants around the building.  I wish I would have a photo of all of the "before" here.  I removed two huge Ravenna grasses as well as other plants. 

  Removing these ancient juniper shrubs was quite the task.  They outgrew their intended spaces, and collected an assortment of dirt, sand, pop cans, plastic bags and some small animals.  Sometimes the hardscaping (rock) looks best, and is the easiest to maintain.  

 This tree bit the dust with the maintenance men calling,"Timber"!  I waited for it to leaf out, but it never happened.  I thought it would look good spray painted silver...a tree sculpture!  Joking!

  Thankfully, all of these things disappeared!  The person mowing the grounds has a big enough job the way it is.

The photos show what I encountered when I took the job as the landscape gardener on this property.  I do respect the people who planted everything, and am sure they loved the planting process.  I learned quickly that plants grow into each other if not pruned or divided in a timely fashion.  Weeds and grass can take over a garden area, also.  So... digging out, dividing, cutting down, pruning, moving, weeding, and mulching were the main activities the first couple of years on the job.  Prioritizing what to do was challenging because it's a public place, and I had to groom areas that people frequently visited along with this mess.    Because there were so many types of plants and weeds in an area, I sometimes accidentally got the two categories mixed up.  I grew weeds and pulled flowers!!

Most avid gardeners know that daylilies are the dandelions of the perennial plant world.  They grow in poor soil, in drought conditions, and MULTIPLY!  The arbor has too many garden areas with them, so it's been an ongoing battle to reduce their numbers and get the grounds under control.  Dig and toss, or dig and divide...that's been the question every year! Daylilies lose blooms if not divided every 5 years or so.

 The trees in the arbor have so many suckers around the trunks that they almost look like shrubs.  Time to get the hand pruners and loppers out to get rid of this mess.  I might finish in a few years as they grow back every year.  Sucker punch chemicals don't really stop them, but pruning them as low as possible helps a little.  Just an annual maintenance thing. 

  Fonda Garden lilac shrubs are overgrown with dead branches and have reached extreme heights.  I am pretty sure they have never been pruned. Here's the front view of the Fonda Garden.  The lilacs are quite large and poorly shaped.  Time for a drastic pruning. Well, they still don't look good in the background.  Maybe they just need to go.  Time to get my saw out again.  The trunks are very large.  My efforts with the handsaw didn't work very well, so a seasonal maintenance worker took a chainsaw to them.  They are gone!  Sometimes things just look better when they aren't there.  The thought of having a backdrop of lilacs was fine, but the upkeep just wasn't there.

  It's really not hard to see that there are other trees growing within, along side, under and almost over this pine tree.  The poor pine tree is smothering!  Time to crawl under it and cut down all the trees who do not belong here.  Also, stump/vine killer application after each cut will prevent me from doing this again.

This set of deciduous shrubs haven't been pruned for a long time, if ever.  It's time to cut them all the way down to the ground with just a few inches remaining. The messy shrubs are now just mere stumps.  Let's see what happens. They are coming back!  They are nice and green, and there's even a fourth shrub that was hiding under a larger shrub nearby.  A little mulch around them will keep the weeds away, and makes the area look groomed and well cared for.