Organic Gardening staff members will be spending a lot of time in the City of Brotherly Love this week, as the 2013 Philadelphia Flower Show—the world’s largest indoor flower show—officially opens on Saturday, March 2. If you’re planning to attend the show, be sure to visit the Garden to Table Culinary Studio in Room 204C, where Organic Gardening editors will be emceeing cooking demos by top chefs, and guests receive free swag bags. Also be sure to check out the speakers at the Gardener’s Studio, located on the show floor adjacent to the Hamilton Horticourt, which include Organic Gardening deputy editor Doug Hall. Doug will be discussing “Soil Matters: The Organic Way to a Healthier Garden,” presented by Espoma, on Tuesday March 5 at 7 p.m.

The theme of this year’s flower show is “Brilliant!” All things British will be on display, from a 21-foot-long Union Jack made entirely of plants to a recreation of Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. To pay tribute to the enormous influence that the U.K. has had on American gardening, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society has partnered with Britain’s Royal Horticultural Society to bring the best of British gardening to the Pennsylvania Convention Center. Featured presenters include Mark Lane, gardens manager for the household of the British royal family, and Raymond J. Evison, author and lecturer and nurseryman for Guernsey Clematis Nursery.

Visitors to the flower show shouldn’t miss the opportunity to take a side trip to another Philadelphia gardening mecca: Bartram’s Garden. Here they will discover that America’s influence on British gardening may be every bit as large as British influence on American gardening. Much of that influence may be attributed to a self-taught botanist named John Bartram (1699-1777), who purchased the land now preserved as Bartram’s Garden in 1728. John was passionate about plants, traversing much of the Eastern Seaboard to collect botanical specimens and seeds. He established a correspondence with London merchant Peter Collinson, sending collections of seeds for resale. Five guineas would purchase a Bartram Box including 100 or more varieties of seeds. Many members of the British nobility eventually became Bartram’s clients, and Bartram was named Royal Botanist by King George III.

A wide spectrum of colorful plants native to North America—including magnolias, mountain laurels, azaleas, rhododendrons, sugar maples, black gums, viburnums, and sumacs—have changed the palette of British landscapes due to the enormous influence of John Bartram. John pursued his plant collecting as a business, creating one of the first plant catalogs in the United States in 1785. His son William Bartram and, later, granddaughter Ann Bartram Carr and her husband continued to operate the business until 1850, when financial difficulties forced it to close. During that time, the operation grew to include 10 greenhouses, a collection of more than 1,400 native plant species, and as many as 1,000 exotic species.

John Bartram’s house is shown in this 1903 painting attributed to Mary E. Bonsall. The core of the house was built by the original Swedish settler in 1684, but it was substantially enlarged by Bartram, who added the distinctive Ionic columns and other details, like the carved inscription show at bottom left.

Since 1891, Bartram’s Garden has been owned by the City of Philadelphia. It is now managed by the nonprofit John Bartram Association in cooperation with the City of Philadelphia Department of Parks and Recreation. The house and many of the original stone outbuildings, including the one John used to package seeds for shipment to Europe, have been restored. And recently, the Bartram Nursery was reopened, offering the first selection of plants for sale since the 1850s. The plants are offered year-round at the Garden Shop and at seasonal sales. Some seeds from Bartram’s Garden may also be purchased through the garden’s online shop.

If you schedule your visit to Bartram’s Garden for Wednesday, March 6, 2013, plan to purchase tickets for a guided tour by Head Gardener Todd Greenberg. And while you’re at the Philadelphia Flower Show, be sure to attend one of the presentations by Kirk R. Brown of the Garden Writers Association, who interprets the life and work of John Bartram. He’ll be speaking at the Gardener’s Studio.

To read more about John Bartram and his circle of amateur botanists, check out The Brother Gardeners, by Andrea Wulf.

Note: You can follow Organic Gardening staff members and events at the flower show on Twitter (@ogmag and @PhilaFlowerShow, hashtags #flowershow and #subarugardens), Facebook (Organic Gardening Magazine), and Pinterest (pinterest.com/ogmag/philadelphia-flower-show).

Best Garden Makeover

The Secret Garden, 1993. Based on the beloved children’s novel by Francis Hodgson Burnett, this film adaptation is a testament to the restorative power of growing things. Its young protagonist, Mary, and her friend Dickon restore the health of Mary’s cousin Colin along with the health of his departed mother’s long-neglected garden.

Best Fantasy Potager

It’s Complicated, 2009. We include the word fantasy in this category title because the sumptuous kitchen garden shown in this film is Hollywood set-staging at its finest. The leading female character, a baker played by Meryl Streep, was trained in France, so it makes sense that she would have a French-style potager. What doesn’t make sense is that in this garden, cool-season and warm-season crops grow side-by-side. Turns out they were grown in a greenhouse and sunk into the garden pots and all, so any of them that wasn’t ready for its close-up could be replaced quickly. And those lush tomatoes? They were wired to the vines.

Best Garden as Metaphor for the Zeitgeist

Il giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis), 1970. This story centers on the members of an upper-class Jewish family who appear to be living an idyllic life in their beautiful walled garden in late-1930s Ferrara, Italy. But the rise of fascism brings with it a more sinister kind of exclusion and enclosure.

Best Institutional Garden

Greenfingers, 2000. Based on a true story, this British comedy stars Clive Owen as a convict in a minimum-security facility in the U.K. who spearheads a prison garden project. The inmates’ efforts are noticed by a gardening celebrity, Georgina Woodhouse (played by Helen Mirren), who encourages them to enter the Hampton Court Palace Flower Show. Georgina has an attractive daughter, and romance ensues. Note: Also award-worthy, albeit for the small screen, is the similarly titled “Green Fingers,” a 1972 episode of the TV show Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. It features Elsa Lanchester as Lydia Bowen, a gardener who refuses to sell her land to developers. They resort to coercive tactics, but in return Lydia plants a crop they will never forget.

Best Unauthorized Use of a Greenhouse

Saving Grace, 2000. Faced with foreclosure after the death of her husband, a small-town widow named Grace, played by Brenda Blethyn, turns to an unusual crop to make ends meet.

Best Garden Holiday

Enchanted April, 1991. Again, the lush landscape in this British drama about a group of Londoners vacationing in Italy is slightly enhanced for the camera, but that only adds to the dreamy character of the film.

Best Use of Wildflowers

Howards End, 1991. Our pic for most memorable scene featuring wildflowers is the scene of unlucky character Leonard Bast strolling through a woodland carpeted with English bluebells (hyacinthoides non-scripta). Okay, so they’re nonnative and can be invasive, but they’re gorgeous.

Other movies that feature pivotal scenes in gardens:

• Gone with the Wind, 1939
• The Godfather, 1972
• Being There, 1979
• Much Ado About Nothing, 1993
• Sense and Sensibility, 1995
• Harrison’s Flowers, 2000
• Pride & Prejudice, 2005
• Atonement, 2007
• The Town, 2010
• Quartet, 2012

George Washington

Rosa ‘General Washington’ (a medium red hybrid perpetual rose), introduced in 1860 or 1860

Thuja occidentalis ’George Washington’ (variegated arborvitae), introduced in 1986

Hemerocallis ‘George Washington’ (a bubblegum pink daylily with a gold edge), introduced in 2007

Washingtonia, a genus of fan palms native to the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico that includes Washingtonia filifera (California fan palm) and W. robusta (Washington fan palm)

Abraham Lincoln

Rosa ‘Souvenir du President Lincoln’ (a medium pink Bourbon rose), introduced in 1865

Rhododendron ‘President Lincoln’ (a rhododendron with lavender flowers), introduced in 1871

Syringa vulgaris ‘President Lincoln’ (a common lilac with blue-lavender flowers), introduced in 1916

Lycopersicon lycopersicum ‘Original Abraham Lincoln’ (a red slicing tomato), introduced by the Buckbee Seed Company as ‘Buckbee’s Abraham Lincoln’ about 1923 and rebred by R. H. Shumway’s Seeds in 1986

Paeonia ‘President Lincoln’ (a red single form peony), introduced in 1928

Rosa ‘Mister Lincoln’ (a dark red hybrid tea rose), introduced in 1964

Hemerocallis ‘Abraham Lincoln’ (a lavender, violet, and chartreuse daylily), introduced in 2008

It would be interesting to learn why these plant breeders decided to name their creations after our first and 16th presidents. If any of you have grown one of these plants or has any more information about it, or know of other plants named after Washington or Lincoln, I would love to update our readers. Please add your comments below.

By the way, did you know that there is no official federal holiday called Presidents’ Day? The correct name for today’s holiday is Washington’s Birthday.

Happy birthday to the Father of Our Country!

Victorian and Edwardian greeting cards often featured roses, and several women illustrators of the period became known for the exquisite detail they achieved in painting the flowers.

Below are some of my rose-themed Valentine’s Day greeting postcards dating from about 1905 to 1915. Happy Valentine’s Day!

Dark pink, for gratitude

Light pink, for desire or passion

Coral, for desire or passion

Red, for true love

“Read love’s tender message, hidden in the rose.”

Cupid bears a message of love.

Red and yellow roses together indicated joy or happiness.

Hearts and flowers

“Love is lurking in your pathway.”

A rose topiary by illustrator Ethel Parkinson

A rose among the thorns

A rose tussie-mussie

Since the feared “Mayan apocalypse” has not happened and the world has not ended, it’s safe to plan for 2013! So I thought I’d check out the current crop of calendars appropriate for gardeners and highlight the best. Bonus: Many of them are now available at reduced prices.

PLANNERS

Organic Gardening 2013 Desk Calendar

Our Organic Gardening Desk Calendar is a great tool for planning and keeping track of your 2013 garden. It’s filled with tips from our editors, seasonal recipes, helpful advice, and much more, illustrated with inspirational photographs from Matthew Benson. There’s plenty of room for writing appointments and to-do lists, as well. $21.95 from the Rodale Store

Digest Your Life Eco Planner

The Digest Your Life Eco Planner, designed by PCP, is printed with soy inks on 100 percent recycled paper. It helps you plan week-by-week and organize your contacts. $5 from Poketo

DESK CALENDARS

Desk calendars are great to display in your office, where you most likely keep track of your appointments electronically and need a calendar only as a visual reminder of the date.

Ephemerals Desk Calendar

The Ephemerals Desk Calendar (I love that title!) is hand-printed on an antique letterpress. Each month has a different illustration of a garden insect by Yasuko Nakamura, and the pages are perforated so that they can be used as postcards once the month is over. $20.97 from Kate’s Paperie

Grow-A-Garden Plantable Calendar

The Grow-A-Garden Plantable Seed Calendar is a gift that keeps on giving. Each page is made of seed paper that is embedded with a different herb or vegetable seed: tomatoes, lettuce, carrots, dill, basil, and parsley. Plant the page when the month is over, and see what grows! Tips for growing and using each type of plant are included. $24.95 from Botanical Paperworks

Cavallini Botanica Desk Calendar

Each year, Cavallini Papers designs gorgeous calendars using vintage and archival images, printed on thick laid paper so they’re suitable for framing. Cavallini’s offerings for 2013 include this Botanica desk calendar, which reproduces engravings that first appeared in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine in the late 18th and early 19th century. $12.95 from Two Hands Paperie

Rifle Paper Co. Botanical Desk Calendar

This Botanical Desk Calendar comes with its own powder-coated steel easel and a reusable gift box. Each 6-inch-square monthly calendar card features a different hand-painted illustration by Anna Bond. $48 from Rifle Paper Co.

DECORATIVE WALL CALENDARS

When you don’t need space for writing appointments and reminders, there’s more room for artwork. These illustrated calendars will inspire your gardening creativity year-round.

Language of Flowers wall calendar by The House That Lars Built

The Language of the Flowers Wall Calendar, from The House That Lars Built, tells a hidden story based on a century-old Victorian secret code. Each flower has a special meaning. It’s printed in Denmark on cotton paper. $28 from Terrain

The Year of the Garden Wall Calendar from Earmark

The Year of the Garden Wall Calendar is a poster-sized print that can be used framed or unframed, with illustrations by Earmark. $17.99 from Earmark via Etsy

Claudia Pearson’s Buy Local Calendar

Each 6-by-9-inch page of Claudia Pearson’s Buy Local Calendar features an illustration of seasonal fruits and vegetables available at local markets that month as a reminder to buy local. $24 from claudiagpearson via Etsy

Botanical Wall Calendar from ModernPrintedMatter

The Botanical Wall Calendar features drawings by Anna Cote. It’s professionally digitally printed on heavy recycled matte white cover stock, and is available either wire bound or single hole punched (so you can hang several months side by side). $24 from ModernPrintedMatter via Etsy

Botanica Calendar by Susan Black

The Botanica 2013 Calendar by Canadian artist Susan Black features 12 of her botanical collages. It is unbound, and printed on heavyweight paper so the pages can be framed later. $32 from 29blackstreet via Etsy

The 2013 Garden Calendar from Rifle Paper is printed on natural white paper. It has a different illustration for each month and comes with rustic twine for hanging. $16 from Rifle Paper Co.

The Vilmorin Vegetable Garden Calendar features 12 reproductions of images from Album Vilmorin (Les Plantes Potagères), a collection of botanical illustrations commissioned by the French Seed company Vilmorin-Andrieux & Cie between 1850 and 1895. Each page is printed on lavish Italian Acquerello art paper and is perforated so it can be framed later. $24.99 from Taschen

WRITE-ON WALL CALENDARS

These calendars have monthly write-in grids that let you keep track of your appointments and special occasions.

Organic Gardening 2013 Wall Calendar

Our Organic Gardening 2013 Wall Calendar is available free with a 2-year (12-issue) subscription to the magazine. Each month of the calendar features a different inspiring photo. $23.94 (including magazine subscription) from Rodale

Cavallini Wall Calendar - Flora & Fauna

The Cavallini Wall Calendar – Flora & Fauna features ephemera from the Cavallini archives. $21.95 from Two Hands Paperie

Cavallini Wall Calendar - Garden

The Cavallini Wall Calendar – Garden reproduces images from vintage seed catalogs in the Cavallini archives. $21.95 from Two Hands Paperie

2013 Snow & Graham Grid Calendar

The 2013 Snow & Graham Grid Calendar has 9-by-12-inch grid pages that give you plenty of room to write, plus a different floral design for each month. $27.95 from Paper Source

2013 Food Landscapes Calendar by Carl Warner

Look closely at the scenes featured on the 2013 Food Landscapes Calendar, by Carl Warner, and you will see that each “landscape” is composed entirely of food! $13.99 from Calendars.com

Canned fruits and vegetables, relishes and preserves are presented along with fall flowers and sheaves of grasses at this Harvest Home display in a Bucks County church in 1907.

Potted plants join the mounds of onions and other produce on the altar of this Allentown church in 1906.

The pastor of this Reformed church in Lehigh County was happy to have his portrait associated with this beautiful Harvest Home display circa 1906.

I hope everyone’s harvest was successful this year and that you had enough for your families and enough to share. Happy Thanksgiving!

The garden was laid out to take maximum advantage of the sunlight in the courtyard outside of our employee cafe. Our Facilities crew built 10 4-by-8-foot raised beds for us, and they even ran plumbing out there so we can have two hose stations and a produce-washing sink. The plan includes a pavilion, to be added later, that will be used for al fresco business meetings and lunches.

Since the beds are adjacent to the path that some employees and visitors use to get to the cafe, they frequently stop and check out the veggies and flowers. If one of the Garden Club members is working in the garden at the time, they might ask a question or two. We’re hoping at least a few people people will be inspired to start their own gardens once they see how little effort it takes to get so much produce and so many flowers from one small bed.

Our photography editor, Patrick Montero, has been documenting the progress of our garden throughout the season. Here are some highlights:

These 10 raised beds pack a lot of punch, considering they take up only seven-thousandths of an acre. Here they are shortly after planting this spring. The picnic tables will eventually be shaded by a pavilion.

Having a water source near your garden is a huge time-saver.

Weeds can be a problem in organic compost, as you can see above, but if you give the beds two weeks between filling them with soil and compost and planting your crops, you'll have time to do two thorough weedings. Once you plant, apply a thick layer of grass clippings as we did, and the weeds will be minimal. The bed full of weeds above is now lush with annual flowers, and nary a weed in sight!

One of our Garden Club regulars planted four 'Pink Lemonade' blueberry bushes, a gorgeous variety that will provide three-season color as well as food for the birds (and the humans!).

Grace Montero, Patrick's 4-year-old daughter, picks up bean-planting pointers from our OG Test Garden manager, Doug Hall.

Grace is learning how to compost, too!

For more pictures of Rodale’s employee garden, follow our OG Behind the Scenes board on Pinterest.

This garden began by accident. Organic Gardening had a booth at the 2012 Philadelphia International Flower Show, and our marketing team bought some plants to enliven the space. It looked great:

The Organic Gardening booth at the 2012 Philadelphia International Flower Show

After the show, they stashed the plants in a storage room temporarily, planning to offer them to the OG staff because they didn’t have space for them at home. The plants were naturally not happy in storage, and some started to drop their leaves. Therese and I brought them out and placed them on the cabinets outside of my office, where they would have light from the adjacent atrium and we could give them a drink.

As the plants sat in their “temporary” home awaiting new owners, passersby would stop to admire them and ask where they came from. They were like a mint garnish on top of the plain vanilla ice cream of the walls surrounding them. My office even seemed a little cooler and the sunlight from the atrium a little less harsh.

Since I have little luck with most houseplants in my apartment (not enough light), I thought, Why not keep them here, where more people can enjoy them?

So I begged, borrowed, and bought some containers to repot the ones that needed repotting and arranged the collection into a tableau that covered the whole countertop.

There was only one problem: We use that countertop whenever Doug, our Organic Gardening Test Garden manager, has extra plants or produce to give away.

The solution was to go vertical. Our friends at Avant Garden Décor came to the rescue by donating several large parasol-style “Queen Elizabeth” hanging basket planters by CobraCo., along with extra coco liners. Workers in Rodale’s Facilities department came and installed sturdy hanging hooks, and we were in business!

The plants were hung two days ago, and now everyone who walks down that hall on the way to the busy conference room—and everyone surrounding the atrium above and below us—has something green and soothing to look at.

I hope you enjoy these photos as much as we enjoy our hanging garden:

In the hanging baskets, left to right: Hedera helix ‘Ovata’, Nephrolepis exaltata (a relative of the Boston fern, cultivar unknown), Maranta leuconeura ‘Kerchoveana’ (a type of prayer plant called rabbit’s foot or rabbit’s tracks because of the markings on its leaves), Epipremnum pictum Argyraeum (satin pothos, silk pothos, silver philodendron). Below them, the plant with the large leaves and white flowers is Spathiphyllum ‘Mauna Loa’ (peace lily).

The view of the hanging gardens from across the atrium

Schefflera actinophylla (Australian ivy palm, octopus tree, Queensland umbrella tree). This native of Australia and New Guinea will reach 40 feet tall under the right conditions. We may need a bigger atrium!

Schefflera arboricola (Hawaiian umbrella tree, dwarf umbrella plant, arboricola tree, Hawaiian elf)

I’ve tentatively identified the plant with the solid green leaves as Dracaena fragrans 'Janet Craig' (Deremensis Group) and the striped one as Dracaena fragrans 'Warneckei' (Deremensis Group). They’ll be easier to identify when they get larger.

Microsorum musifolium (crocodile fern). This one is my favorite—I love the reptilian texture of its fronds, which resemble snakeskin.

Bringing in heavy machinery to regrade the yard had been ruled out because of cost, but the design I came up with nevertheless required some extensive recontouring. I proposed repurposing the concrete wall blocks that were being used to line the ornamental bed as edging for the new vegetable garden. This helped correct an awkward junction with the neighbor’s property, since the retaining blocks helped stop soil from washing down into their driveway. But it necessitated bringing in a chain saw to muscle out a stump that was in the path of the wall blocks. After about a day’s hard labor—did I mention that this area of the yard also concealed buried rocks and bricks?—the veggie garden now has a nice clean edge. I knew we could have allowed the garden and the lawn simply to butt into each other, but I also knew it would bother me whenever I looked at it. In the future, I’d like to add another layer of blocks so that the veggie garden is level, since right now it slopes on each side. But I’ll have to save up to buy the blocks. In the meantime, at least it is segregated from the lawn on the side that faces the house.

Our next task was removing some of the soil in the long, thin planting bed to make space for the lawn to flow onto and off of the sidewalk. But where to put the soil? We could have carted it away, but it came in handy to solve another problem with this yard: the drastic changes in grade from one part of the yard to another. As we dug out parts of the ornamental bed, we used the soil to fill in the lowest points of the yard that had tended to get waterlogged, as well as to soften the grades in the areas where the slopes were steepest.

Which left us with another problem: Large patches of bare soil that had to be covered with grass. At this point, my landlords were probably thinking they should have just bulldozed everything and put down sod. But they had to cover those bare patches, so after comparing prices of sod vs. seed, they decided to sow seed and cover it with grass seed mat. And that probably would have worked brilliantly, if I hadn’t given them this piece of advice: Put down a layer of compost before sowing the grass seed. They diligently followed this advice, spending a day screening a truckload of municipal compost and applying it to the bare patches, and then sowed the seed. And then they faithfully watered twice a day for the next few weeks. The municipal compost proved to be full of seeds for yellow nutsedge, the pernicious weed commonly known as water grass or nutgrass, which simply adores being watered twice daily. It is now threatening to overpower the new turfgrass. Sigh. Sometimes it ain’t easy being green! I am hoping that this weed becomes less of a problem once we cut back on the watering regimen, but we may be dealing with it for some time now that is has gained a foothold. I am looking into using dry molasses to control it organically. If any of you have had success with this, please let me know in the comments below. And stay tuned!

Once the contours of the yard were established and the outlines of the lawn filled in, one of the largest tasks remained: Preparing the soil of the main ornamental bed for planting. As I mentioned in my previous post, this bed had been given little attention for the past two decades or so, and was therefore full of stumps surrounded by colonies of weeds, chief among them Canada thistle and field bindweed. We knew this when we started. What we didn’t know was how much else was hiding underground. My house was built in 1910, before the advent of indoor plumbing in the neighborhood. I suspect that what remained of the privy was buried in part of the garden. What’s more, municipal waste disposal didn’t exist either, and part of the yard had apparently been used for burning/burying household trash. As I began to dig the bed, I uncovered bricks, large rocks, broken glass, car parts, and children’s marbles, among other things. Some had probably been dumped into the outhouse when it was retired. This was obviously going to take longer than I had thought. I realized the whole bed would have to be double-dug if the plants were going to have a fighting chance. The soil itself was fine—a perfect texture, the consistency of chocolate cake—but it was just so full of stuff! Here’s what a patch of it looked like before screening:

Garden soil—a.k.a. “the debris field”—before screening. Very chunky!

And here’s a small patch about 3 feet square, after about 2 hours of double-digging and screening:

Garden soil after screening—very smooth!

This is when my landlords began working to earn their Merit Badges for Gardening Under Duress. Since I fold like a cheap lawn chair when temps hit the 90s, I was out of commission for at least a week during this last heat wave, so they stepped in and double-dug the entire bed. I suspect my landlady’s son has earned enough good will points to last him the whole summer, if not the year. He helped her on some of the hottest days this year—or ever—for our area. Whew! I kept reminding them that this only needed to be done once, but I still felt guilty.

Well, not too guilty. I wasn’t exactly idle while all of this was going on. I was choosing the plants for the new garden.

I know what you’re thinking: “That’s not work; that’s the fun part!”

Obviously, you have never seen my spreadsheets:

In my next post, I’ll explain the method behind my obsessive-compulsive madness!

I had a great experience with this recently at my house. I rent an apartment in a duplex that changed ownership last year. The previous owners were of the let-it-grow-wherever-it-lands camp. The new owners, however, want a landscape that is attractive but also easy to maintain. So began the Great Cleanout.

My front yard is the size of a postage stamp (well, a big one, anyway; about 9 by 12 feet). But a lace-cap hydrangea had been planted about a foot away from the front steps and porch railing. That’s at least 2 feet too close, since that shrub would have needed a good 6-f00t-wide space to flourish. So, over the decades, the poor thing had been topped-and-sided until it was little more than several thick trunks and some struggling branches that produced few flowers. When allowed to leaf out fully, it loomed over the entrance like a specter. When cut back, it just looked sad. Next to it were three small conifers that had branches only on the front side, since the porch overhang blocked light and water from reaching the back side. In front of the shrubs was a patch of mostly bare soil with an occasional annual, which the weeds loved to colonize, and in front of that was a narrow strip of grass.

The overall effect was not welcoming. And it was not low-maintenance, since the shrub needed frequent pruning, the bare patch needed weeding, and the strip of lawn needed mowing and edging. So they all came out. In their place, the new owners planted a dwarf golden hinoki cypress (Chamaecyparis obtusa ‘Aurea’), two small boxwoods, a drift rose, and a few clumps of yellow Japanese forest grass (Hakonechloa macra ‘Aureola’). Surrounded with shredded bark mulch—goodbye, lawn!—they offer many different colors and textures while requiring very little maintenance (apart from regular watering until they get established). They will also offer color and texture through the winter, when the landscape can look a bit grim. Even once they reach maturity, they will not outgrow the space or need excessive pruning. Here’s the drift rose, which will eventually cover most of the surrounding mulch:

Colorful and easy-care

If my front yard is a postage stamp, my back yard is a whole roll of them. It’s only about 18 feet wide but more than 80 feet long. Most of the neighbors’ yards are equally long and skinny. The ribbony effect has typically been exaggerated with long, straight sidewalks and planting beds sidelined to the edges of each yard to make room for strips of turfgrass:

My neighbors' yards

I’ve always wanted to break up those strips, so when my new landlords asked me for input on what to do with my back yard, I jumped at the chance.

The yard had a planting bed that ran almost the whole length of it and then looped across the back end, creating two separate islands of turf. Anyone who mowed the lawn had to mow one patch of grass and then truck the mower about 70 feet to the other end of the yard to access the rest of the lawn. In this bed were many trees and shrubs that had outgrown the space, most of which never should have been planted there to begin with. Among them were a white pine—directly under the power line, of course!—three apple trees, a Douglas fir, a black cherry tree, a lilac, a forsythia, and a euonymus. These last five had been planted within a 15-foot space. The black cherry was removed a few years ago after it dropped one too many fruits on the neighbors’ flowerbed, but the rest struggled on until this spring. Here’s the fir, lilac, and forsythia, around which the euonymus was entwined:

Gasping for air

Properly spaced, these four plants would have required about 78 to 88 feet. (At maturity, the Douglas fir alone may reach 60 feet across). They were not happy, and poor pruning over the years had not made them any happier. “Bring on the chainsaw,” I said! And—presto—all of the trees and shrubs in the back yard were gone:

After deforestation

Here’s a rough diagram of the old layout:

Another factor complicating the backyard landscape was that the elevations aren’t level. the ground slopes considerably between the house and the back of the lot, dropping off several feet in one short space. It would be hard to justify the expense of hiring heavy equipment to come regrade the whole lot, so we had to work with what was there.

I drew up a new plan for the space:

Back yard, after: More curves, and a logical flow for the lawn mower.

I would have liked even more curves in this design, and I suspect I’ll work more in as the landscape matures. But this design gave us several distinct areas in the yard: A living-dining area, an herb garden, a “beauty” garden, a lawn, and a veggie garden. And I figured my landlords and I could do most of the work ourselves.

As it turned out, this plan will take more work than I thought to implement. More on that in my next post.