When to pull out all the stops : A garden out of control

Some of the properties I work on are so big, beautiful and planted out so much that any single human employed or not is going to need some help! Every landscaper and every gardener will have different philosophies when it comes to the spaces they take care of. For me I will never suggest a plan for a space that isn’t reasonably easy to manage. I also won’t take one on that I don’t have the time to take care of myself. This year we did have an early spring but it was still colder at the start. That meant the weeds still took about a month to come in once it got warm. A new customer with a huge and stunning property kept bringing up a certain very large, very central and very, very fully planted garden. She said the weeds turn it into a jungle every year and I was all like ‘yeah, we’ll get to that.’ Then the hot weather came and all of a sudden I got it.

Realistically I could leave a full time employee on that property all summer long to deal with the weeds and most of them were in that one showpiece garden! I have my doubts that she could even keep up. Even if that is an option for you do you really want a gardener at your house literally all summer long? This garden was FULL of everything you could possible put in a garden, lots of shrubs, perennials, annuals a slate pathway, wired garden lights and of course a full carpet of weeds. One thing it didn’t have though was a stitch of mulch. The other gardeners that tackled this garden just didn’t have the infrastructure to bring enough in.

I talked to the homeowner who was heart sick over how it looked the last few summers and we agreed to pull out all the stops. The permanent weed barrier that I use most often is in fact permanent and will never break down but it does let some Burdock and Horsetail through. Since the bulk of the issue in this garden was horsetail I decided to use a layered approach. I first used a layer of traditional professional landscaping cloth and then the permanent ground barrier and finally to cover the whole thing with a thick layer of black mulch. Traditional landscaping cloth does work well but even the professional stuff starts to develop holes in about 4 years in our often windy ocean front climate. With this approach the lower black cloth layer should keep virtually everything down to start and the permanent barrier would take over from there. I cut both layers around every plant and lifted all the heavy stones placing them back over the barriers. It was a long slow process but the results speak for themselves.

The homeowner had her doubts but after a month of results she directed us to do the whole property. To say she was thrilled is definitely an understatement. Most of the rest of the property only needed one layer. These pictures show the before carpet of weeds and one month of weed growth after both layers of barriers were installed. Now this 1600 square foot garden gets about an hour of weeding once a month and looks fabulous pretty much all of the time!

If you’ve got a garden space that you have heavily invested in and lost control of fear not it can be tamed once again! Going forward it can even be a garden that’s incredibly easy to deal with. Ask yourself is it worth a lot of time once or dealing with weeds basically forever? For spaces like this though you might have to pull out all the stops!