Hacking it Back: Julia in the garden

Back yard? Property? The landscape?

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I really need to find a better name to describe the 3 acres around my old Maine farmhouse, because "garden" conjures up the wrong vibe (as the kids say.) It's not really landscaping, because, well, so much of it is overgrown. There are the bones of previous decades landscaping  - Ross's many, many bulbs, the other flowers he's planted in beds that were once nice and round but now seem to have melted slightly, the initial three forsythia that have become 300 forsythia, etc, etc.

 

 

The garden enthusiast in my marriage was Ross; my job was to help pull and prune where he told me and to have a cold beer waiting for him when he came in from mowing. So it's been a steep learning curve, now the whole she-bang in my responsibility. The last time he was able to work on it was the summer of  '15, and I was, shall we say, taken aback at just how quickly my nicely maintained grounds were determined to become Longfellow's forest primeval.

 

Can you spot the apple tree?

I decided to rally my forces and tackle one or two important tasks each year to push back the jungle. I really don't want visitors to expect me to come to the door in a head scarf and fur coat. Two summers ago, when the Guest Son was living here, he took down and chopped a whole lot of deadfall wood, made me a compost pile and several garden bed containers, and killed 90% of the Japanese knotweed infesting the back with Roundup. (I've always tried to keep it organic, but sometimes, you need to hire an assassin.)

 

 

Last summer, one of my young friends helped revitalize my front porch flowerbed, my cousins chainsawed the Yews of Doom that were literally darkening my front door, and we kept all the grassy areas - one half to three quarters of an acre - well mowed.

 

This year, my goal is to get rid of my foul nemeses, the Asian invasives. I have oriental bittersweet. I have multiflora roses. I have non-native honeysuckle. And, native but oh-so-annoying, the forsythia that's rooted itself everywhere and the sumac saplings that must have been spread by seed to different zones in the back, as the ONE parent tree I want to live is next to the shed in the front yard.

 

My enemy, the bittersweet

Every non-rainy morning this month, after doggie breakfast, I head out back with the pups, my deerskin working gloves, and my lopper. I've pulled bittersweet vines out of the ground. I've cut out raspberry canes (they also spread everywhere.) I've taken out multiflora roses that have grown fifteen feet up into the apple trees. 

 

This is neither glamorous or creative work, but it is deeply satisfying. Unlike, say, writing a book, where a good day's work is 1/120th of the whole, when I've clipped my way through a tangle of thorny vines that look like the defenses around Sleeping Beauty's castle, I can see the tangible results in a pile on the ground and in a path through the briars. 

 

 

 

Cleared! Well, partly.

There are still real roses and wanted forsythia to prune, grape vines to rehang, flower beds to mulch and daffodils to divide and replant. Non of that is going to happen this year, and that's okay! 

 

Dear readers, what are the long-focus, dirty jobs that you find yourself enjoying?