Some random updates from the garden

I really want the entrance to the yard, as you go past the ferns and bleeding hearts, to envelop you in green.

Ultimately I want to put an arbor here with an evergreen vine on it but for now I decided to use my victory wine barrel planter to plant fennel. Fennel gets tall and bushy pretty fast, so it should fill in quickly. Fennel also gets thuggish, so I wanted to keep it confined to a container. Putting the barrel at the entrance to the yard will remind Greg, every single time, that I am stubborn. Because he wouldn't remember otherwise.

The fennel is small so I filled out the planter with astilbe and petunias. Go, old lady annuals, go!

I bought this stool at a thrift shop two summers ago and it sat in my garage, unused. I threw some Autumn Joy sedums in a pot (they will get way too big for it but I can transplant later) and it's nice to have some height in this area. I want to transplant my clematis to this area so it can climb the fence and not have to compete with the hops.

Sedum telephium

I planted a purple sedum that I'm in LOVE with, sedum ‘Bertram Anderson.' I think the purple is going to look awesome with the Oregon stonecrop (the seafoam colored one on the bottom).

Sedum ‘Bertram Anderson’

Bleeding heart is beginning to grow up through the hosta and I love it.

So once the fennel grows in and I get the rain garden in there should be a corridor of green that draws you into the yard.

BEHOLD, MY MS PAINT SKILLS!

So there will be fragrant mock orange and daphne on the left and fragrant sarcocca on the right (can you see its tiny form next to the wheelbarrow?) and a lush rain garden with grasses and sedges that draws you in and points you toward our awesome deck (which is coming soon).

 

We pretended to have dinner on the deck the other night (before I replaced the fence). It was lovely.

Summer in Oregon, I'm gonna marry you and have a million of your babies.

Crossing things off the list

I have some time off before I start my new job so I decided to finally tackle the dilapidated fence on the west side of the yard. I've also watched an inadvisable amount of Real Housewives of New York. That show makes me feel dirty.

The fence didn't provide a shred of privacy.

Also, the cedar (it's a cedar! not a hemlock!) was planted too close to the fence and, as it grew, it pushed the fence out.

So I had to build the fence around the tree. But first I made sure to NOT measure the existing posts (which I was reusing) before I went to buy wood. I just assumed they'd be six feet apart but, no, these posts were sunk by a drunk toddler, so some of the spans are 93 inches, some are 70, some are 82! It's fun because it requires custom cuts for every single stringer AND now the fence isn't up to code. But I digress.

 

Ignore the horizontal board, it was just to help me keep the board height level.

We still have some special cuts to do around the cedar but I figure I should let the enginerd help with that. This weekend I had a hot shirtless Greg mowing my lawn in my newly private yard that I love and I felt so, so lucky.

I win.

We were driving to Home Depot to get a replacement blade for the lawnmower and I mentioned that I wanted to get one of those wine barrel planters. Greg was like, "Let's get it next time."

"Why?"
"We'll get it next time."
"I'm getting it."
"Just get it next time."
"Do you know me at all? Now I'm getting two."
"It's not going to fit in your Honda. Let's just come back with the truck."
"I CAN FIT THREE IN MY HONDA. NOW I'M BUYING THREE, ARE YOU HAPPY?"

Anything can be a competition if you try hard enough!

A hail mary from the mystery willow!

I decided the mystery willow is gone. The neighbors behind it moved down the street and rented out the house to their nephews who smoke constantly, play loud bad music, and generally make me feel 80 years old, and why can't they just keep it down so I can putter in my yard, for pete's sake?

So I want to chop it down and plant something fast growing, evergreen, and DENSE. I succumbed to the Backyard Habitat rep's suggestion of a California wax myrtle. It grows really fast, it's evergreen, and it forms a nice privacy hedge.

But the mystery willow said a hail mary! It produced fruit.

The mystery willow is a pear tree! Goddamn it.

I'm still going to chop it down. My inner 80 year old demands it.

Candy apple red, baby

The lawnmower I bought for $10 off of craigslist fell down and went boom. Or Greg ran over the sewer clean-out with it and bent the shaft. So we searched Consumer Reports and got this beauty. It's so red and shiny! I love.

It belched white smoke when we started it, so badly that we ran and got the fire extinguisher, just in case. It stopped after a couple of minutes, so I guess it was just being dramatic. For its next trick doves will fly out of the bag catch!

Let's move rock!

There's been no movement on the doug fir saga. My next door neighbor E asked (through another neighbor) if we could hold off on meeting. It's starting to sound like E is having signs of diminishing mental faculties. A landscaper was hired to clear the shared area under our roses and he told me she said I was "trying to take over her yard."

The neighbor who is trying to help us figure this out says that E is paranoid and convinced I reported her, and there's no reasoning with her. I'm still hoping we'll have a sit-down, but I'm not convinced it will change anything. I'm trying to just let it go, since I never did anything in the first place, and you can't rationalize with dementia.

The city forester called me back and said that she can't see anything on file and she doesn't know of any way that someone could force the removal of a healthy tree. The forester said the only thing she could speculate would be a letter from a neighbor, for insurance purposes. Apparently, if someone was concerned about the tree, they could send a certified letter to the owner and state that they are concerned about the tree. Then, if the tree fell down on their house, the neighbor who owned the tree would have to pay for repairs.

So maybe someone sent her a letter? Or maybe they didn't? I may never know because she won't talk to me directly. *Sigh*

Instead of thinking about this I've been working on the backyard. I decided I wanted to continue the retaining stones around the area where the cement slab had been.

The cedar bark wasn't staying where it should.

Et voila!

And now I would like to never haul cement or stone or rock ever again.

A quick update on the tree situation

My neighbor from around the corner called me today and told me that my next door neighbor E (the 83 year old with the doug fir in her yard) received the letter and flowers I left her . . .

. . . but she doesn't believe that I was not the one who reported the douglas fir to the city.

Photo yanked from here.

We are going to have a sit-down, just the three of us, sometime this week to clear the air. I wish E would just sit down with me, since this third neighbor has absolutely nothing to do with anything, but I'll take what I can get. In the meantime I called the city forester to find out if they can really require someone to remove a healthy tree from their backyard. The woman I spoke with declared herself "a bleeding heart arborist" (Portland, I LOVE YOU) and said she'd look into the veracity of any complaints on the property.


Y'all keep your fingers crossed that I can convince E that I have logged no complaints to the city, nor do I have any complaints about her or her yard, forever and ever amen.