Trees and Landscaping

We just finished pruning two amur chokecherries, cutting last year’s growth off the decorative grasses, and cleaning up after the cutting of a cottonwood out front. 

We planted the amur chokecherries in 2008, the autumn after we moved into the house.  We fell in love with these trees’ shiny, coppery bark and chose trees with graceful clumps of main trunks.  We’ve put them in places where they will provide increasing summer afternoon shade to west-facing windows over the years.  

The chokecherry tree that we saw at Caras Nursery that made us want one.  It's next to the parking lot by the mulches.

The tall decorative grasses we keep planting a few at a time—groups of Calamagrostis Karl Foerster and Elytrigia Jose Select.  Last fall, we planted the most recent set, three Karl Foersters, above the kitchen patio wall.  I have a thing for Karl Foersters and greet them when I see them around town.

Gregory in the cottonwood tree.

The cottonwood that we had cut was sending roots and shoots into the fescue and blue grama and also into a place where we have been planning to build a path.  The roots were also growing under the driveway and buckling it.  We hired Gregory Pavinick, a professional arborist, to cut down the tree itself; a friend of his took the logs to burn.  

Gregory, Wayne, and Eric load the logs into Wayne's truck.

 

Over some days we cut up the remaining branches and hauled them with the grass cuttings and other tree branches in two pickup loads to Eko Compost, a company that makes compost from yard waste.  I hated to part with the beautiful chokecherry twigs and beloved grass tops, but I admired them as we worked with them and finally left them behind.   Now we have only two problem cottonwoods, but they are over our property line in the easement, and the urban forester will not agree to cut the big, bad one until he tries putting in a root barrier along the edge of the driveway.  Ha.

 

Here is a branch of the big, bad cottonwood in a photo from last October after a windstorm.  That's one of the chokecherries to its right, and some of the Karl and Jose grasses are in this picture, too.

When we first moved in, we told neighbors who walked by as we worked outside that we were on the five-year plan.  Approaching five years in the house, we see that we are on a much slower boat.  Getting to know these neighbors who continue to stop and talk with us as they walk past is part of the landscaping pleasure.  Interesting, interested people. 

We’ve approached our project so far as creating a background structure of big plants and planting among these elements only the smaller things we need or are sure we either love or need to try.  Poco a poco se va lejos. 

Eric grilled last summer on the kitchen patio with one of those smaller loved and needed plantings in the bank behind him: dicentra spectabilis alba, planted in May 2010 in memory of wonderful friend and gardener Alice Kane (1916-2010).   

Alice at her desk at McDonough School in 1975.

Alice was the vice-principal at McDonough Elementary in Hartford, CT, when I taught there in 1974-75.   

I moved to Idaho in the summer of 1975, so I really didn’t get to know her until we were separated by distance.  Over the years, as she studied ancient Greek, lived in France, read and recommended books, and gardened, she wrote letters.   

Alice and Jim Kane with Karen and Austin McNey in Alice's garden in 1984.

We shared letters to each other and only a very few visits, mostly in her garden; she and Jim visited us once when we lived in Binghamton, NY.  What an inspiration in gardening and life!