Some further thoughts (after last post) on garden privacy…and just an update about work.
I shouldn’t feel too guilty about work because we have been accomplishing a lot…
We got the Buddliea and a bunch of other shrubs pruned at Cheri’s garden:
Oops, where’s the after photo? It ended up a little taller than knee high. Oh well, here’s a nice photo of Porsche, Cheri and Charlie’s dog, always a delight.
This area is a secret garden and full of flowers in summer.
It’s a treat to work in a secluded garden because a lot of our work is right out in public, like in this park in Long Beach by Marsh’s Free Museum:
One always has to be cheerful, answer questions, and try not to look too horribly disheveled.
We’ve been getting lots of yards of soil energy (one by one, which is all our trailer will carry), and mulching assorted gardens, including that Long Beach park.
Continuing on the spring clean up mission of mulching and cutting back, we headed for Marilyn’s garden yesterday. After dumping a full load of debris at Peninsula Landscape Supply, we picked up another yard of soil energy. This wonderful neighbour dog named Bob came over for pets and then played King of the Mountain. His coat was so soft and clean you would never think one of his joys is running through the mud and lying on the sand pile. We were told he also loves the soil energy pile because it’s warm.
Back to the question of privacy. One of our goals with Marilyn’s garden on a smallish lot near Surfside was to provide some privacy from the neighbour’s garage, and also to stop the eye at the edge of the garden. Here it is yesterday with last year’s grasses and perennials still up:
Here it is in the afternoon after a day of chopping: all the seclusion rather shockingly gone. We had tried planting escallonia along the back for a year-round stopping of the eye, but the pesky deer kept eating them. We’ve been experimenting and find these particular deer leave California wax myrtle alone, for now, and so we’ll try those instead.
The deer (three of them) were just waiting next door to see if we would plant something new and delectable.
(They don’t bother Marilyn’s hellebores, as you can see by the healthy state of this one:)
Last summer, the garage was almost hidden by perennials, as it will be this summer. The trick is to balance privacy with leaving lots of room for flowers and grasses. (If it were my place, I would probably have put up a solid fence, the privacy solution that leaves the most room for a colourful floriferous garden.)
But last summer we ran into a sudden privacy/stopping the eye crisis when neighbours to the south cut back all the lower limbs on trees between the two lots, including limbs which were definitely on our side! Suddenly, the eye was no longer stopped by a wall of evergreen but flew through to the stuff next door.
A telephoto shot like the one above exaggerates what we see, but that is actually how I felt, that the stuff against the neighbour’s garage was all I saw when looking to the south! So we’ve added some shrubs on Marilyn’s side, and we hope this year they will take on enough height to make a green wall once again. Years of experience helped us choose successfully some shrubs that the deer have left alone all winter: Pieris, wax myrtle, Ceanothus, a couple of deciduous barberry ‘Helmond Pillar for a bronze contrasting effect, Ilex ‘Sky Pencil’. All came through the winter looking healthy. We’ll let you know if we manage to get our evergreen screen effect back this summer. (Again,I often feel in a situation like this that the most instant solution is a sudden tall solid plank or panel fence!)
[January 2013: Over the course of 2013 the lower parts of the border evergreen trees filled in some on the south side of the garden so it feels somewhat more enclosed there.]
Give Porshe a hug for me ;D
Also, we have lots of deer and even during the most severe winters they have never bothered the boxwoods.
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Ah, I had a lovely collection of boxwoods in my old (fenced) garden. I’ve noticed around here in areas where they get a lot of wind, they tend to yellow and not look very good, but in a sheltered garden, I adore them.
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Hi Skylar,
Marilyn’s daughter here…OMG!! This is the first time I’ve seen Mom’s garden since last summer! Nothing like a little clear-cutting to ruin your day! The entire property and neighborhood USED to be so secluded. It saddens me to see how much development has occurred there, and how it is now so open to the neighbors. I appreciate your gardening philosophy and awareness of Mom’s privacy there. Good luck choosing specimens. Perhaps planting some of the tall variety of Miscanthus I mistook for bamboo, might help – at least for the summer???
I love looking at your progress at the new house, and your clients! You are so very talented! THINK SPRING! S. 🙂
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It was indeed rather shocking when neighours had a man cut the lower branches off the trees that were on your mom’s side. I think he was just gung ho and did not think. They were apologetic and planted some foxgloves on their side…which is not really going to block that view at all.
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[…] declare the usual seasonal success in almost hiding the neighbour’s garage from the view in Marilyn’s garden. Marilyn's […]
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[…] was achieved looking to the west. We are still waiting for shrubs to fully fill in to provide year round blockage of the driveway of neighbours to south and west who hacked down their sides of the garden (and to […]
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