Growing up knowing that green grass = good and brown grass = bad, I find the golden crunchy lawns around Portland in summer hard to accept (for those of you not in Portland, folks don't water their lawns here in the summer time...my dad thinks it's laziness, but it's just being 'green'). I am not saying to dump loads of water on your lawn; rather I am encouraging lawn alternatives. The age of the large lawn is over! Be creative, do something that looks good year round not just for part of the year, do low maintenance if that’s your thing, just do something!
Okay so back to our project…even before we found our house we planned to tear out the majority of whatever lawn there might be, for the front yard that meant replacing it with gravel and plantings. Gravel may be to southwest for some but I love it, actually that is probably why I love it. The picture above was taken the day we made the offer on the house, we bought in 2005 when you were lucky to even find a house in inner NE Portland let alone have time to think about it, ours was 1 of 3 offers placed within hours of the house going on the market. Besides the lawn there were a few other things that had to go like the azalea mass, overgrown vinca vine, the hideous house number plaque, the cheap brass light fixture, those wrought iron railings and that paint job! A white house, how creative…yikes, we had a lot of work to do!
The one part of the front yard project we didn’t do ourselves was tearing out the sod. We hired someone to do it and haul it away. We then rented a rototiller and Andrew went to work loosening up the soil that had been compacted under the sod for 58 years (wow, is that even possible?…yep...our house was built in 1948…). Unfortunately it proceeded to rain hard while he was working making for a miserable and messy job, and I now know, probably destroying the structure of the soil. According to my Master Gardener training, (taken after the project was complete), we collapsed the tiny air pockets in the soil that the plants depend on for oxygen for their growing roots.
The gravel delivery came next. Since the truck just dropped the load in the street we had to get it out of the street the same night it was delivered. Our ‘fill the wheel barrel, dump, repeat’ motion resulted in this lovely piece of installation artwork which we enjoyed until the weekend when we had time to spread the gravel. You are probably thinking, "why didn't they plant before putting the gravel down?" Well that was the plan, the gravel delivery in the street changed up the order of things.
Then came the planting! I had worked up a planting plan with the idea that since we had no actual structure (retaining wall, fence), the plants would provide a sort of structure. I have read many times the admonition “Never plant in straight lines! Nature doesn’t work that way.” Well first off, rules are made to be broken, second I have a thing for straight lines and geometric plantings. My goal was to have a pattern that worked with our sloping yard. Grouping plants in a way that looked pleasing, had lots of texture, and responded to the shape of the yard...allowing your eye to flow from one end to the other.
So you might have guessed, the best part of this project was the plant shopping. I was buying with wild abandon, it was fabulous! That was my plant 'storage' area shown above. It felt like I was planting a jungle, however to look at these pictures now I see what everyone else must have seen at the time. We got several positive remarks along the lines of “it will look really good when it fills in” I was puzzled and a little saddened by this feedback. I somehow managed to see it already filled in and matured. Now of course I realize those plants were tiny!
The ‘after’ pictures you see here are from 2006 and 2007. The computer with 2008 pictures on it is at the doctor, with an unknown and potentially fatal illness. I was putting off posting this project until I had those pictures but decided it was time. There have been changes: of course the flax is toast (although the ‘yellow wave’ is actually starting to show signs of life!) the 6ft tall cordy’s turned to slime and were chopped down, the kniphofia just got out of hand, looked bad and was taken out. The row of blue fescue made a lovely toilet for the neighbor’s cat, it died (the fescue not the cat), and was replaced with black mondo grass, one of my favorite ‘hard as nails’ plants that spreads nicely.
Lots of change…guess that means there is material for a future front yard ‘after-the-after’ post, eh? Oh, and the house is still white...that's gonna take another year or so, after the shade shack is complete!
Tonight one of my favorite nurseries, Garden Fever, was open an hour later than usual for Tomatomania! I stopped by on my way home to pick up a couple of things...and have a glass of wine, who knew? They were serving wine and appetizers, what a fabulous idea! It was a warm sunny evening...I got to shop (I didn't buy any plants, I only bought fertilizer for my tomatoes and chicken grit for planting my agave, can you believe it?) and drink a nice glass of red wine. Heaven.
That is when I saw the Solanum pyracanthum. I grew one a couple of years ago and it was amazing! How dangerous is a plant with huge spikes coming out of both the top and the bottom of the leaf and up and down the stem? Ouch!
My plant got huge...with irritatingly perky little purple blossoms, I picked most of them off, probably why it only got a few small fruits on it. I almost bought another one. And who knows? Maybe I'll end up going back...the 'purpureum' variety was nice...
Darin has gifted me a couple of pups in the past which I’ve planted in a protected area. While they haven’t flourished (to say the least), they also haven’t died. This relative success has me wanting to try other spots around the garden, and now I am rich with agave pups! Some in the ground and some in pots…if only they could grow up to look like their mom and siblings…
And it lives to flower again!
