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The Complete Guide to Landscape Design, Renovation,
and Maintenance
by Cass Turnbull
BEGIN TO BRING ORDER OUT OF CHAOS
So you've read the first section on pruning and you know it's not
going to be enough. You have bought a yard where everything is enormous;
you sense that some plant-happy person planted it thirty years ago
and stopped taking care of it ten years ago. Or perhaps you never
knew what to do yourself, so rather than ruin everything by pruning
ignorantly, you let it all get way out of hand. Something has to
be done.
Maybe you bought a yard full of giant sheared poodleballs, and globe
aucubas, camellias, or something seems wrong with the fruit trees,
maples, and dogwoods (they were topped or stripped and now are suckering
back like crazy!); or you made some mistakes yourself. You know
better now and you're ready to do right by your yard.
This is your section of the book. First read "How to Prune"
so you don't get into trouble again, then come back to this.
Before you are allowed to begin major renovating you must read three
case studies, to get your attitude adjusted. Then you can begin
your chainsaw work.
Case Study #1: Lady Who Knows How to Treat a Tree
I got a call from a lady a few years ago who wanted help in her
yard. I knew I wanted to work for her just from the way she talked
about her Empress tree. She called it her "grand lady."
She proudly referred to the month in spring when its giant purple
(foxglove-like) blooms made such a spectacular show that she could
hear the squeal of brakes as passing motorists stopped to take a
longer look.
This lady, Ms. K., has caught the gardening bug, and she has a bad
case. She gladly pays the price of owning a huge (sixty-five foot)
and uncommon tree. It's a big price. For one, the rest of her yard
and house are rather small and shrub bed space is at a premium.
It's difficult to grow things under a tree that takes up half her
front yard. She must add lots of fertilizer and seek out tough plants
that can survive the shade and root competition. She must water
extra diligently in the summer since the thick canopy of leaves
prevents rain from reaching the plants below. She's done a great
job.
The Empress tree is a messy tree. Branches die back and fall off
and have to be cleared out to keep the beds looking good. The "grand
lady" is always dropping something that has to be cleaned up.
Its giant round leaves fall by the tons in the fall. In the spring
Ms. K. rakes dead blossoms, then husks of seed pods during the summer.
Our proud gardener knows that she is caretaker of a treasure and
it's worth the trouble--she's got the biggest and best tree in the
neighborhood.
She tells the story of the previous owners, who were finally so
fed up with all the leaf raking that they hired someone to come
cut the tree down. The chainsaw was actually started when two alert
neighbors ran up the street to literally exclaim, "Woodsman,
spare that tree!" And they promised to rake all the leaves
for free, to ensure the tree's survival. All things worth having
and doing take time and care. There are no maintenance-free yards.
An appreciation of beauty can make your yard chores less burdensome.
Case Study #2: Big Mess--Small Mess
I went on a consulting job last year to a young woman's home. She
was beginning her second year there and didn't know where to begin.
The garden had been planted by a plant lover (phytophile) but had
been let go for several years. Grass was coming up through most
of the plants in the back. Some previous homeowner had sheared the
camellias and escallonias. Many things were overgrown, running into
each other, over sidewalks and steps. Some plants were looking leggy
and sick because they were finally being shaded out by trees that
had gotten big. Unfortunately she had hired Maul-and-Haul landscapers
before she reached me, and they had managed to mal-prune several
of the trees and shrubs.
It is unfortunate that one of the first responses to an overgrown
yard is to go out and cut everything back, thus creating a smaller
mess rather than a big mess. It also makes the final solution more
difficult. It will often take years to sort out some types of badly
pruned plants.
In this case the perpetrator had topped a young spruce. Not one
hundred feet away on a neighbor's property sat a previously topped
conifer that now boasted an ugly double leader.
Also, sad to say in this yard, the same fellow had topped her little
dogwood. In this crowded area a skimmia was reaching up into the
dogwood tree, and her dogwood was a little out of sorts as well.
What should have been done was to re-define the areas between plants,
pruning to lower the skimmia (selectively pruning, of course) and
to visually raise the dogwood by removing some of the limbs hanging
too far down into the skimmia. The dogwood needed to be selectively
pruned and thinned to make it look cleaner, clearer, and much more
beautiful, in such a fashion that the casual observer could not
see where it had been pruned.
Because of the topping her dogwood suckered back in the next year--the
Hydra effect--and looked really awful. It will take years of patient
restorative work to get it back in shape. If it had been done properly
just once, the amount of upkeep would have been minimal in successive
years. Oh well, this is one of those stories repeated endlessly
everywhere. Don't you make the "cut-it-all-back" mistake.
Throwing Out The Baby with The Bath Water
I get so nervous when I drive by beautiful old landscapes that have
been ignored for ten to twenty years. I know they're in for it,
especially big ones. There's a parking lot in the neighborhood I
grew up in that I'm very worried about. It has lots of wonderful
old plants, including one thing I can't identify (thus making it
doubly rare and wonderful) with big pink fuzzy blooms in the late
summer. (No, I don't think it's a tamarix.)
Frequently, when homeowners' or business owners' landscapes get
out of control, they just remove them totally. EGAD! You drive by
one day and thirty years of mother nature's work is gone in one
day with a backhoe to the dump! Maybe an old pine or something is
left to hold down the fort. It's sort of like a person who didn't
do his or her housework for fifteen years, then just guts the house
and rebuilds the inside. Well, that's one way to do it.
Frequently, some truly thoughtful and beautiful landscapes that
have looked good through years of neglect get replaced with amazingly
dull "low maintenance" landscapes. These are called "juniper-and-bark"
places. They are just a cut above a parking lot itself, esthetically
speaking. If you are thinking about tearing out your landscape and
replacing it with all new plants, don't. First go to a nursery and
start pricing new shrubs, noting the lack of anything of a full
grown size. They're all babies! (Could it be that that's why it's
called the "nursery"?) If you replace your landscape with
new plants it will cost a fortune, and if you find some full grown
plants they will be astronomically priced and twice as likely to
die the first year. When you get your new babies home you will be
tempted to plant them too close together so that the yard looks
okay now. That is sort of like building a playhouse the right size
for your two-year-old and expecting him to live in it forever. Plants
must grow and get bigger (most of them, anyway). You cannot successfully
stop their doing it. Some people ask for "fast-growing"
plants in an effort to get a good landscape sooner. The bad news
is that fast-growers don't stop once they get to where you want
them. So now you've paid a fortune to take out a landscape that
had probably maxed-out in size, and you've replaced it with a new,
expensive one that is designed to be a mess in half the time.
So what is the alternative?
Sort Out, Renovate, Rehabilitate, and Exterminate!
You can think of the renovation process as the "this old house"
of landscapes. In renovating a house you learn how to replace the
knob-and-tube electrical wiring and what to do to refurbish the
leaded glass windows and hardwood floors. In our yard renovation,
we kill the laurel, keep the dogwood, move the rhody, and renovate
the forsythia.
See this chapter in action.
SUMMARY
Common errors are:
- Cut it all back and make it smaller.
- Remove it all and plant a new yard. The first doesn't work and
the second is too expensive or takes too long to look good.
- Pruning is one tool to use in renovating the overgrown yard.
- There are no maintenance-free yards. Your goal should be to eliminate
unnecessary work while maximizing natural beauty.
Forward to Sorting Out
Back to How to Prune a Tree Limb
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