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?

 

 

How I Spent My Summer By Julia Spencer-Fleming, Age 53

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: It's important to state, to begin with, that I am not a gardener. Some of the Reds are real gardeners; I know Lucy and Deb do...things...with their plants that I find hard to follow. Red emerita Rosemary Harris is a Connecticut Master Gardener, for heaven's sake. In contrast, I require extensive briefing from Ross to delineate between weeds and flowers, and my whole family was amazed when I was able to keep a pair of geraniums alive over the winter.
  

I also have no landscaping ability. You know how some people can look at a bare yard and imagine trees, ornamentals, borders, flower beds and hardscaping? Yeah, not me. I could maybe follow one of those detailed plans you see in BETTER HOMES AND GARDENS - the ones with the dots and the numbers and the pictures of the appropriate plants on the sidebar. But if I had to figure out something on my own? Let's say I'd spend a lot of time convincing the neighbors “the natural look” was in.
 



Which is why it's odd that I'm spending my mornings this summer undoing a decade of neglect in our back forty. When Ross and I bought our (now) 200-year-old farmhouse, we were 20 years younger, held one job between us (I was a stay-at-home-mom) and had tiny tots who took long naps. We were able to spend hours every week keeping up the apple trees, blackberry canes, grape arbors, asparagus, high-bush blueberries, lilacs, forsythia, quarter-acre vegetable plot, compost pile and, of course, the mowing. Did I mention we have almost four acres? 
 




What happened? We got older. The children got older, and wanted to do something on Saturdays besides watch mom and dad labor outdoors. I distinctly remember the moment I gave up on the vegetables: I was sitting on a milk crate beneath a blazing July sun, about fifteen months pregnant with Youngest, trying to weed the lettuce row while the kids whined about going to the beach. I thought to myself, Wait a minute. I live in Maine. It's summertime. Why aren't we at the beach? When I realized I could buy the entire output of my garden from the local farm stand for fifty bucks, I got off that milk crate and never went back. I think it's still there, buried in weeds and mint gone mad.





As our weekends and evenings grew busier, we ceded one part of the back garden after another to nature. We concentrated on the front of the house, and the space where the kids played, and the spot where we grill. Everything else grew and spread and ran wild. Until this spring, when I took a long stroll around our property and realized Ross and I were just a couple cats away from becoming the Beales in Grey Gardens. “Ross,” I said, “We have to Do Something.”





Thus, my morning routine. I get up, have my tea and toast, slather on sunscreen (at least a shot glass worth!) and head outside with my pruning hook. I've been taking down forsythia that's grown so dense around one side of the barn that it looks like a mangrove swamp under the leaves. 

Ross and the Boy have been cutting down saplings and overhanging branches. We're pruning grape vines and slashing Japanese knotweed (to be followed by rooting up as many rhizomes as possible and then tarping it next spring.) We're yanking out berry brambles that have surrounded the old play house as if it was Sleeping Beauty's castle.





I figure that by the fall (unless Ross and I succumb to heat stroke/a heart attack/back strain) we'll have beaten our property into a rough sort of shape. Next summer will be more pruning, more uprooting, maintenance and some planting. We've estimated we have about three years of Maximum Useful Offspring, with 2-3 healthy kids in their teens and early twenties home for the summer and happy (ok, begrudgingly willing) to help. After that? Hey, there's always “the natural look.”