Necessity Garden

 Sometimes the actions of one person force others to make accommodations with surprisingly happy results.  Such is the case with the landscaping around Gladys.

When we bought this property 10 years ago, Gladys had a paltry four-flower rose garden next to the front, heaved-up, uneven sidewalk and a wild jungle of invasive pepper trees, towering cactus, dying palm trees, a leaning "ear" tree, and other overgrown or dead shrubs filling half of the back yard.  In cutting down the trees, digging out the shrubs, and pruning back what remained, we gained an additional area about six feet deep spanning the entire width of the back yard.  

Since we were not here in the summer and had no place to store lawn care equipment, we hired a lawn service.  We fired the initial man after he charged us for summer lawn care that he did not do, and we hired a much more reputable firm that we use to this day.  Sadly, no one is perfect.

A hired man for the second lawn service trimmed too near to the house, chipping off all the paint.  To remedy that situation, we planted flower gardens all around the house.  Now the house is safe, the paint remains intact, and we have flowers to make Gladys look pretty.  Wherever we do not have flowers, concrete touches the house.  So the careless landscaper was the reason we now have beautiful shrubs and flowers surrounding the house.

Now we face the same situation in the back yard.  Trimming next to the vinyl fence is causing cuts into the posts of the fence.  To keep the string trimmers away from the north and south fences, we added a strip of concrete; however, I did not want that along the back fence.  Instead, we are adding yet another flower garden. 

A few days ago we bought edgers.  Rick dug a trench into which he built a wall for our new garden.

Rick started the garden against the
corner garden on the northeast corner 
of our back yard.

The most important thing was to make sure
that the edgers were level.

The garden will come out three feet from the back fence.

 We took the garden from one corner garden to right below the large live oak tree.  We had to stop short of the oak tree due to all of the large, underground roots of the tree.  Adding edgers any closer would not have done any good since the roots would just push them up each year anyway.

The garden edge curves to a close just shy of the tree.

Lots of digging eventually will leave us
with a level garden into which we can add beautiful plants.

I started to dig out the weeds and grass on the inside of the garden and got about half-way before we had to quit for the day.  Of course, the following day we had rain, followed by cold and lots of wind.  We have not been outside since that time to finish the garden, even though we do have landscape fabric waiting to go down.

We can wait, though, since we probably should wait another week or so before we plant anything.  We want to get the shrubs and flowers in early enough so they take root before we go north for the summer, but we don't want to plant too early and have the flowers freeze.  

We have more finishing work to do, and we will soon get that done.  Then once again, necessity to protect the fence will result in a beautiful addition to our landscape.