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The Complete Guide to Landscape Design, Renovation,
and Maintenance
by Cass Turnbull
TAKING CARE OF YOUR YARD
The bad news is that to maintain your yard takes work-- cursed work.
As a professional gardener, my cohorts and I cringe at the customer's
request for a low-maintenance yard. A "low-maintenance"
yard is either the deep woods or a concrete lawn. Gardens are, by
their very nature, living, moving, growing, changing systems. Once
you decide which plants you want and which you don't (one definition
of a weed being anything in the wrong place), you have drawn the
battle lines.
Dandelions, blackberries, morning glories (bindweed)-- these are
the enemy. Grass, mountain laurel, Shasta daisies, these are the
innocents to be protected, nourished, enjoyed. And even some of
these can become the enemy if found in the wrong place: grass in
the lawn is good--grass in the shrub bed--a weed.
Shasta daisies may be all well and good unless they overcome their
neighbors in the perennial border. As sure as God made the heavens,
the same customer who wants the low-maintenance yard will, in the
very next breath, ask for a perennial bed--the epitome of high-maintenance
landscaping.
Life Is Maintenance
Without maintenance, the universe, entire universe, succumbs to
the third law of physics--entropy. It states that everything that
is, is falling apart. I'm sure you've noticed. In fact, with a few
notable exceptions, LIFE is MAINTENANCE. Your body, its cells and
molecules, is in constant change and motion, but it is maintaining
a reasonable sameness over time--albeit more wrinkled and tired.
Work is maintenance. We maintain the house, the car, the boat. Even
on vacation we try to maintain perfect comfort and peace, or we
maintain the level of activity we call fun. Too much is stress;
too little, boredom.
The maintenance work in your yard can be kept at a minimum. When
I went into the gardening business, the best advice I got was "don't
work hard, work smart."
The good news is that by being smart you can reduce garden work
to a manageable minimum and not too physically taxing, at that.
Like the dentist, the professional gardener strives to put him or
herself almost out of business--leaving only regular brushing, flossing
and check-ups.
In this section we will go over the smart ways to beat weeds, to
water, and fertilize your plants and the strategies and philosophies
behind pest control.
You know many of these already. A well-planned yard-- one that takes
into account the mature size of plants--takes more patience but
less pruning work. Using selective pruning is wise because, unlike
shearing and other forms of "bad" pruning, it stays done
longer, although it takes greater initial investment in learning
how-to. You eliminate the need to weedeat when fences, trees and
lampposts are surrounded or bordered by shrub beds, not turf.
Automatic or semi-automatic irrigation will save you from most of
the drudgery of watering by hand. And mulch will cut your weeding
time and effort by half or more. The combination of sufficient water,
smart plant choices and good soil will give you the healthy plants
that resist most pests and diseases. No huge pesticide or plant
replacement costs here.
In gardening, like taking care of your teeth, you avoid those big,
painful, costly fix-ups by adhering to a strict preventive maintenance
routine. Weeding (which comes in after mowing, trimming and edging
in actual maintenance hours spent) is the same way. Whereas all
gardening teaches patience, weeding actually instills vigilance,
humility, and, worst yet, tenacity.
Gardening Is An Unnatural Act
Weeding can be as much of a challenge as any well matched contest.
Many people think of it as unskilled labor; most people are distressed
by the fact that, like housework, it won't stay done. But weeding
is skilled work. You need to know your enemy, the weeds: their types
and their strategies for surviving in your beautiful garden. Then
it becomes a game of strength, stamina and wits. Each month is a
rematch, and your gratification can be to vanquish the opponent
faster and with less effort each time. You can never, however, defeat
them utterly and completely. As gardeners, we are imposing a halt
on the natural succession of plants in the back yard. The fittest
will always succeed in crowding out and overpowering our less vigorous
ornamental plants if we choose to cease our intervention. Gardening
is an unnatural act. Because, you see, we are endeavoring to construct
a false plant community and then we keep it from changing according
to the laws of natural succession by weeding and pruning. Furthermore,
we rake out leaves, and then (silly us) have to add fertilizer and
mulch to make up for it. And weeds are, themselves, strangely enough,
created by humans.
Weeds generally do not exist in old, long established plant communities.
In these old ecologies we find that plants have just divided things
up fairly and in a balanced fashion--they demonstrate an interlocking
harmony that inspires awe in those humans who glimpse the incredible
interwovenness of nature.
But those pioneering, greedy, tenacious species we call weeds follow
only receding glaciers, landslides, and humans. They like disturbed
soil. Most weeds in North America came from Europe, stowaways in
the hulls of ships, as seeds in dirt ballast. Others were foolishly
imported by heedless Pandoras who brought them over for sentimental
reminders of home. These plants, well behaved in their natural habitat,
run unchecked through new ecosystems, displacing and destroying
the balance of centuries because their natural population checks
were left behind.
Kudzu in the southern United States is a famous example. It is a
vine that was imported from the Orient to help curb erosion. It
took off immediately, infesting farmland and countryside alike.
People make jokes about kudzu vines strangling them in the night
and burying lazy dogs. So successful is this plant in its new home
that, whereas the "climax" ecology of the southern states
was once a forest, the land left to its own battle now will end
up as monotonous flat fields of kudzu alone.
One definition of a weed is a plant out of place. Ralph Waldo Emerson
said, "A weed is a plant whose virtue has yet to be discovered."
But gardeners know that beyond this is their staying power, their
ability to defy eradication and propensity to overcome their neighbors.
They eliminate the variety and the diversity in the garden that
is the essence of its beauty.
All gardeners become philosophical after awhile, and most come to
a quiet understanding that our own, creative, intelligent, magnificent
species, Homo sapiens, is in the truest sense a "weed"--or
pest species, the most dangerous weed on the planet. Humans out-compete
almost all other species. We even eliminate total ecosystems. We
reduce the bio-diversity of nature, cultivating instead for sameness,
threatening to create a world filled with exact replicas: cornfields,
white chickens, brown cows and one kind of tomato. Some say that
intelligence was an experiment in nature that didn't work. At what
point did Homo sapiens cease being simply "vigorous" and
become "invasive"?
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| Many fragrant and small delights are missed by people with
dull gardens or those who have the work done for them. |
The natural checks of our population--disease and war--have not
been successful, nor have we, in keeping the population within manageable
bounds.
But, back to the weeds that intend to overpopulate your miniature
world.
The mistake most people make is that they take weeds personally.
I mean--they are personally offended that these plants are trying
to take over and won't go away. I take weeding seriously but not
personally. It's a game. I decide who the good guys and the bad
guys are, and the object of the game. Nothing stays done in this
life and nothing stays the same--especially gardens. So, with that
understanding, weeding then becomes something to do, not something
to get done. It is while weeding that you gain the intimacy with
your garden that bonds you to nature. Because you have to be out
there, crawling around on hands and knees (humility being the lesson
here), you are forced to feel, smell and touch nature. There are,
for example, many plants whose leaves smell if you brush them, and
only because you are out there weeding will you discover this. And
many fragrant and small delights and wonderments are missed by people
with dull gardens or who have their work done for them.
SUMMARY
The smartest ways to reduce maintenance costs are:
(1) Plan for mature size of shrubs and trees.
(2) Selective pruning instead of shearing.
(3) Reduce grass-trimming time by designing beds (not lawn) around
structures.
(4) Automatic irrigation.
(5) Have good soil, good drainage, eliminate steep slopes.
(6) Appropriate plants for the site.
Do regular weeding and pruning maintenance to avoid costly fix-ups
later.
Forward to Weeds: Hand-to-Hand Combat
Back to Installation How-Tos and Tricks
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