Diagnosis: Severe neglect

Not everyone that has a garden wants to tend that garden but everyone wants it to look nice. A garden you didn’t plant in the fist place can quickly become a source of stress. Well beyond just know knowing which are weeds a garden you don’t know how to care for can start to really irritate you over time.

That was the case with this garden nothing had been done for 8 years and the plants were starting to attack people walking the driveway next to a parked car. There was no way to pass one of the thornier shrubs without getting snagged on the way to the front door. The homeowner was told he had some amazing rare plants but still didn’t know which was a weed. His only request was to clean it up and make it look nice or rip it all out if I couldn’t do that.

I tackled this one with a blank slate which is always fun. I started pulling and pruning and found out what the plants were are where they we coming from in the first place. We even found a set of granite stairs that hadn’t been seen in nearly 10 years! I did find some rare ferns but a couple of Spirea had probably choked a lot of other great plants out over time.

In most cases I’m a big advocate of installing permanent landscaping cloth around each and every plant over paying someone like me to just keep weeding a space forever. In this case however the garden was so mature that once it was cleaned up the shade provided by the plants already there was almost enough to keep most of the weeds down. Installing a fabric barrier was also likely to damage a lot of what was already there. In this case I brought in two yards of black mulch for a very dense layer between the plants.

The homeowner was thrilled with the results and asked me to keep taking care of it for the foreseeable future. After an initial 15 hours of taming this garden only requires 5-6 hours of work to keep it looking it’s best each year! Since he had developed lets just say ‘extreme negative horticultural angst’ directed to this garden I wanted to find a way for him to enjoy it going forward. I found out he was an avid chef so I added a section for growing fresh herbs which. Each year I replace the annual herbs like basil and they supply him with lots of very delicious pasta!