Recently I had the displeasure of refinancing my house. Besides airing my dirty financial laundry to the kind loan officer, I had to repaint parts of the house to cover peeling paint. That meant painting ALL of my fences. Even though I have a fairly small yard, the job took several days, especially painting every little slat of the picket fence in the front yard. I wondered if I could trick some unsuspecting kid into paying me to paint the fence himself, but no fitting candidates walked by.
After I finished painting the last slat on my front fence, I took a deep breath. The fence looked clean and white and beautiful. And the yard behind it? Blecch! Weedy grasses, clumpy dirt clods, I never pay attention to the darn thing unless I'm worried about getting fined by the city or the fire department. If you want to know what my yard looks like, watch the t.v. show "Malcolm in the Middle" and you'll get a pretty good idea.
Anyway, my cheery, freshly painted white picket fence now made my poor neglected yard look especially retched. I had to do something.
My yard is fairly tiny. My house occupies about a half-sized lot, and one of the main attractions for me was that I wouldn't have much yard to take care of. And yet--I still manage to make it look bad. I hate grass, and grass hates me. Walking to and from my house, I regularly shield my eyes so I won't have to see my weedy eyesore.
I wanted to fix the yard without having to take care of it. Putting in drought-tolerant plants seemed especially good--not because I care about the environment or anything like that, but because I don't want to have to remember to water my garden. I'm a plant killer. Except for weeds. Weeds love me. Anyway, I didn't want to be reminded every day that I have the same effect on plants as a Ringwraith.
Instead of putting in a lot of plants, then, I decided to create a rock garden -- sort of an art installation. I love huge art projects. I hate gardening. If I could make the garden into a huge art project, then I could stick with it and make it work. And then ignore it because there wasn't much I could really kill. A friend of mine called it a zen garden. Please, there is nothing zen about this. It's not about being in the moment, it's about avoiding weeds and dead plants in the future.
I dug up the yard into 4x4 foot squares, sectioning them off with plastic garden barriers.
I used flexible plastic landscape edging pieces to create designs within the squares.
With this design, I used weed blocker to deter the weeds. We'll see how that pans out. With later sections of the installation, I used newspaper, mulch, and plastic sheeting in different combinations.
For this swirl, I used three different kinds of landscaping rock--lava, white marble, and "canyon red."
Then I added drought-tolerant plants. Many of them are basic cactus succulents.
The ground cover is moss rose. It's supposed to be an annual, but I'm hoping it will stick around for a while.
In this section, I used newspaper and mulch to control the weeds.
We watered the newspaper to flatten it. I swear that's a hose.
On top of that, black mulch.
In this patchwork I used three kinds of rock. The center square will host a manzanita bush. I'll plant that in a couple of months, in the fall, when the weather is more permitting. Since manzanita is a native plant, I could really ignore it and it should flourish in spite of my Ringwraith abilities.
The next square has a river of rocks flanked by scarlet begonias. Yes, I'm talking about the Grateful Dead.
Adjacent to the "river" is a design that looks either like the Green Lantern or a Tie fighter.
I decided to go with Green Lantern. It was hard to find green landscaping rocks. I actually had to take a 30 mile drive to an industrial area just outside of L.A. It was worth it! The color of the rocks is "surf green." The photo doesn't do it justice--it really is very green. In the middle is a lavender bush.
By the way, I'm still working on the yard. Creating my space in 4 foot square sections means that I only have to do a little at a time. Here's how it looks so far. First the swirl and checker:
And the "river lantern":
Now, please don't say that I'm gardening, because I'm NOT! It's a huge art project, thank you very much. Getting rid of the weeds is just an added benefit. Rocks > Weeds.
***New addition: I added a sunburst. The circles have moss rose--no pics now but they are beautiful bloomers.
