This time of year, homeowners need to keep ahead of invasive weeds otherwise things in their yard can quickly get out of hand.
This is especially challenging for me this year because it is my first spring in a new house.
New things are constantly popping out of the ground and I have no idea which ones are purposeful and which ones are working to suffocate the flowers and plants we actually want.
We moved into the house at the end of September, long after the flower-growing season had passed so every new shoot and bud is a true surprise.
Previous homeowners put considerable thought into my landscaping, which creates a lovely setting I am utterly unqualified to maintain.
My landscaping approach at our first home was less like Edward Scissorhands and more like Freddie Krueger. I wielded my weed whacker as a weapon of mass destruction eviscerating anything that wasn’t grass, a tree, or a hydrangea bush.
I’m going for a more delicate approach at this house, which has me surveying the garden beds with the urgency of a post-9/11 homeland security officer suspecting everyone as being part of a sleeper cell.
Since I’m deep over my head, I’m using professional help with a plant-identification app on my phone.
I snap a picture and wham, the app tells me what I’m looking at and how to care for it. But what I really need it to tell me is which plants to keep and which ones to remove.
Aesthetics, I’ve learned, aren’t the only thing that go into a well-thought out yard. For instance, my dwarf honeysuckle shrubs were likely planted to attract pollinators and bring vigor to the garden.
I hadn’t once considered my garden’s vigor prior to reading that sentence. Now it’s practically all I think about.
What a complicated world I unlocked.
I go back and forth between having great reverence for the original landscape design and hating the owners for the unnecessary pretension of it all.
And I fully recognize the absurdity of being a guy who’s struggling to grow grass on one end of the property while also caring for a set of Chinese Peony’s on the other end and nursing a Bearded Iris in the middle.
I don’t know what a Bearded Iris is and I’m literally reading the thing that tells me what a Bearded Iris is while I’m writing this sentence.
The app has a strange habit of making pleasant things sound mundane and mundane things sound beautiful.
I was charmed by the description of my Narrowleaf Bittercress until halfway through when the app labeled it a “noxious weed” capable of “large scale infestation.” Talk about burying the lede.
Then there are the easy decisions like removing a giant bush that was blocking part of our reservoir view. The landscaper we hired to remove it said, “in about a month that plant will bloom beautiful flowers.”
We said, “that’s great, rip it out,” and haven’t regretted it once.
Do I really want my yard decorated by the sort of people who willfully chose to put wallpaper in their bathrooms seeing no problem with mixing paper and humidity?
It’s a mixed blessing. Though it is nice finding beautiful flowers tucked into different parts of our yard.
When Jenny’s maternity leave ended, all I had to do was walk around the yard with my kids to snip a truly beautiful home-grown bouquet for her office.
Still, it isn’t enough to assume something that looks deliberate is deliberate.
I’ve been carefully monitoring a row of awful weed-looking plants that have sprouted on the garden bed on top of our pool. My initial impulse was to trim it immediately but the placement seemed too intentional so I checked with the app.
As I suspected, they may eventually turn into beautiful flowers called evening-primrose.
The app describes evening-primrose as an herbaceous perennial plant recognized by its yellow flowers which open in the evening and close again at sunrise.
You know, nighttime: the time of day when everyone’s swimming.
I’ll give their evening-primroses a shot this year, but I’ve got a couple of extra weed whacker spools in storage just in case.
Until then, I’ll either be wandering the yard taking pictures of my plants or sitting by the pool waiting for my weeds to bloom.
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