Death of Poplars

[mrissa]

If you had two* people in a house, one who made green things grow and one who made them die, you might be forgiven for thinking that the latter was the appropriate person to set to pruning the bushes. I am no longer sure of this decision at all. I'm not done with the beastly things, but they are already hacked-up, pitiful excuses for greenery, and it is not likely to get any better from here.

I think Mike is going to cry when he comes here. It's usually very good to have friends who do cool things like bonsai, but then when you have to go cut the bushes that they will walk past on their way into the house, you see their face in your head, kind of half-horrified and half-laughing -- because they are good enough friends that you know that expression -- and you hear their voice going, "What happened?" And the answer is, I'm not entirely sure. I pruned them last year. How often do I have to do this? Seven times? (If you say seventy times seven, I will weep.) They are attempting to take over the front walk. I am attempting not to let them. I have the concept that visitors to my home should be safe from the foliage. They drew blood, but I mostly filled the yard waste bin. I have retired from the field of honor, bloodied but unbowed. Mostly unbowed. Only slightly bowed.

Dealing with the yard makes me feel like a hideous combination of Meg March and Lucy Ricardo. I don't like feeling like either of them, and my reaction to it is not to sob theatrically and try to get someone else (someone male) to handle it but to kill things. Faster! More branches! Wah!

My mom tried to tell me last year that working out in the yard would make it feel more like my yard. It does not. I still expect someone to come along when I'm hacking at things with the clippers and shout, "Get away from there! You damn kids! What do you think you're doing?"

Chives. I like the chives. They came back all bright and cheerful and budded and are lovely and do not attack me. I think I shall plant the whole yard full of chives. I will mow the chives weekly. My yard shoes will smell permanently like a baked potato. Probably my feet will smell that way a good deal of the time, since my yard shoes are Dr. Scholl's sandals. It will be better than this cranky clash of barbary bushes and God knows what those red things are and the little prickly weeds that can go through the garden gloves and poplars, oh, poplars. Sometimes they are sneaky little bastards, the poplars, and they grow right up next to bushes, inside where you can't see them until they're two-year-old trees and you can't yank them out easily any more. But I am the death of poplars. Wah.

*Yes, there are three people in this house. But one has back spasms bad enough that the other two are encouraging him to stay away from sharp implements.

Comments

[mkille.livejournal.com]

We have lilacs along one side of our property. Lovely things, lilacs. Except when the neighbors allow bramble bushes to grow up and over their fence, creating a smothering bramble blanket. We can't uproot them--they're on the other side of a fence. So we try to keep them pruned. Sorta. There's only so much blood we're willing to shed for lilacs. We have three free and blooming bushes now, and two or three buried-alive ones, which are probably screaming in terrified high-pitched lilac voices. Sigh.


And then there's the bamboo...

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I didn't even get back to the lilacs. No time. Sigh.

[scottjames.livejournal.com]

Do you grow bamboo outside? I want to grow bamboo in a pot outside, but I'm concerned about winter.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't say we grow bamboo...we endure it. It came with the house, and we have utterly failed to kill it. I'm not sure if being in a pot would affect its hardiness, but here, the stalks die in the fall, and then new ones shoot up in the spring. We get a fair bit of snow, but temperatures don't normally go much below 15 F, even at night.

If you put it in a pot...couldn't you bring the pot inside for the winter? We do that with some of our wimpier plants that die back--dig up the roots and leave them in the basement.

[genevra.livejournal.com]

The way-past-prunable overgrown ugly bushes in the front of my house are GONE! My parents came over a couple weeks ago, and mom watched the twins while dad and I waged war against the vile things. We used shovels and an axe and a chain hooked up to the pickup truck (complete with country music playing on the radio, even!). My house looks kinda naked, but it's way better than it was.

The scary thing is, I had to keep running back in to help with the kids and stuff, so I was only actually working on it half the time that dad was, but I was still *exhausted*. Why can't I keep up with a man twice my age?? (Yes, my dad's 70 and still able to do an afternoon of physical labor.)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

We're going to have to have a landscaper (an un-landscaper?) in for some of our bushes in the front. There are too many of them, and we lack a pickup truck and sufficient experience/coordination not to hack ourselves to bits.

[cadithial.livejournal.com]

explosives, muahahahahaha :)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Uhhhhh, suuuuure!

(surreptitiously removes cadithial from list of people to ask for landscaping help)

[cathemery.livejournal.com]

I had a similar experience recently. ..

[cathemery.livejournal.com]

I was going to say, if they drive you that crazy, get rid of them. Bushes aren't worth that much pain.

I think with the Dad issue, it's a matter of having been raised to work, and to work hard, every day of your life. And he has worked so hard and so long that he can pace himself and accomplish more than a weekend (or hourly) warrior.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The question is, would a replacement item be less work? Because I'm not convinced that it would.

[cathemery.livejournal.com]

What do you need for the area? I mean, if you *have* to have large brambly painful-to-prune bushes, that's one thing. If you just need vegetation to decorate the sides of your walk, get something that only grows, say, knee high or shorter, without thorns, and with no pruning. There are such plants! I swear it!

Most sidewalks to front doors are so narrow one average-sized person is the limit. For some reason, people have this thing about putting shrubs *right next to the path* so that when the shrubs grow, they overhang the path, making it uninviting and/or dangerous.

In our old neighborhood, I watched a new family rip out some evergreen hedge placed too close to the sidewalk, which opened up the walk, made the place look welcoming---and then they installed barberry, at the same spacing.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's actually a fairly wide area next to the front walk. We're going to have to have bushes in the back if not on both tiers, because it's just too deep an area to plant with flowers every year.

We have barberry. Among other things.

[cathemery.livejournal.com]

Nothing against barberry, as long as guests aren't expected to fight past a thorny section, as you mentioned earlier. I like easy access. :)

I'm just fanatic about people not having to do more garden work than they really want, and sometimes setting your yard up to be less work is a lot of work. .. ironic, that.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Luckily for us, the previous owners planted much of the back in hostas. I hate hostas, but I would hate ripping out hostas and dealing with something else repeatedly even more. So we have hostas, and I pull the weeds from around them occasionally and generally ignore them otherwise, and they seem happy.

We're not keen on barberry either, but none of it is in the access problem category, so it will only get ripped out if we decide someone's allergies can't take it.

[cathemery.livejournal.com]

At least the hostas are green and grow. I like them, spouse doesn't, so my collection is quite limited. Hostas have been really popular the last few years.

What's really funny about me worrying about easy-care for your yard is that I am setting up a yard that will require a lot of care for at least a few years while things get established, and probably a fair amount of weeding, even after that, and I hate weeding. And I sunburn so easily that once the sun hits, I spend most of my time under shelter.

It's good to have plants you can ignore, that will still grow and be green. You are reinforcing my own recent thought that I should use more shrubs in the front yard instead of filling it up with small perennials: I don't really want to spend all my life out there weeding and worrying about the plants.

(Allergies are the pits.)

[cathemery.livejournal.com]

. . . as your comments suggested to me, might be more accurate. You didn't say thorns bit your guests, I simply envisioned it from your bloody pruning experience. Sorry.