Posts Tagged ‘labyrinth garden’
Ruthless Trimmer
I suspect gardeners with more skill and knowledge would cringe to witness my barbaric technique when wielding the ferocious blades of my hedge trimmer. I don’t so much as prune the ornamental growth and surrounding woods in and around the labyrinth as ruthlessly hack it back from impeding the pathway opening.
It had been too long since I last shaped the variety of plantings that decorate the walk through the labyrinth, and they showed it. I wasn’t going to get away with leaving a few odd trimmings on the ground as mulch because there was just too much of it.
Out came the rake and, eventually, even a pruning saw to remove some real branches before I could get around to pushing the mower along between the rock borders. The thick grass and dampness of humidity made the cut less than ideal as the mulched cuttings became a sticky mess, but the bottom line is, it has been mowed, which it wasn’t at the start of the day.
There still remain plenty of unsightly weeds and some tall grass in the nooks and corners around the rocks that the mower can’t reach. That will require some focused weed pulling or deft application of a string trimmer to bring down, but that will need to wait until I finish clearing the rest of the hay field and back pasture fence lines.
I am just as ruthless with the STIHL trimmer with the small gas engine when it comes to growth around the fences. It’s a great way to burn off any aggression if a person is so inclined. But that’s not me. I may trim ruthlessly, but I do it with love. Tough love, you could say!
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Why Bother
Feel like making a guess? What the heck do you think is happening here?
If it wasn’t already obvious, here’s a clue:
Yes, we are trying to dissuade Asher from drinking out of the landscape pond. Unfortunately, he will move right past a clean bowl of water to the pond and ignore the blockade by stepping through the reeds to lap up anyway.
I don’t know if my perception is accurate or simply a figment of my imagination, but the fact that Asher tends to drink from any puddle he comes upon no matter how gross it looks might be echoes from the life he led as a stray before being rescued. One morning we came upon tall grass that bent over our path due to the weight of water droplets from dew. Asher began licking the water droplets off the blades.
He lived in a foster home for six months and I’m confident they provided as much water from a bowl as he would ever want. It strikes me as odd that he shows this tendency to act like he must drink any water he comes upon.
Our pond is probably attractive because there’s just SO MUCH water but Cyndie puts chemicals in it to control algae and enhance pond health so we’d prefer he not automatically resort to this option whenever we are romping around in the backyard and he is off leash.
The way he moved past the patio furniture as if it wasn’t even there has me thinking I may not bother trying that again. We’d really rather not put up a fence but it may come to that for a while during the retraining period. Right up until the time we give up trying and put our energy toward more achievable dog obedience goals.
I was trimming tall growth around the rocks in the labyrinth yesterday and discovered the deer had chomped all but a few leaves of the hosta down there. I don’t know why we bother expecting it won’t happen this year. It happens all the time.
I asked Cyndie if they’ve eaten the ones up behind the house yet. Nope. One year, she tried putting some nasty smelling repellent on the hostas. It was bear or coyote pee or something like that. She doesn’t remember. We don’t know if it worked because it smelled so bad we quit walking around back there and never saw whether the plants got chomped or not.
We are now more inclined to use Irish Spring bars of soap or any other variety of scents we can tolerate.
Too late for the hosta in the labyrinth again this year.
Maybe I should have stacked some patio furniture around them.
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Slow Gardening
Not unlike the methods we have employed on the driveway, chipping away at a big job in small portions, this week we have been giving the labyrinth a thorough going over. So thorough, we have been moving and replacing each of the rocks while weeding and trimming the grass around and beneath them.
At the pace of this level of detail, it will be amazing if we finish before the labyrinth garden gets covered by snow. Each morning before we start, I have been giving the driveway project ongoing attention, moving a couple loads of composted manure by wheelbarrow to create a gradient beyond the gravel shoulder.
So, both projects continue to hold our attention.
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The long hours in the sun had Delilah patiently hiding in the shade while we toiled. When I broke for lunch yesterday, I brought her up to the house with me while Cyndie continued to work. As I was gobbling up some sustenance, I glanced over to find Delilah laid out on the tile floor, her head placed precisely in the glaring spot of sun shining in through the skylight.
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Apparently, it wasn’t as hot as the bright sunshine she worked so hard to avoid down by the labyrinth.
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Last Cut
I know this cat named Pequenita who is highly skilled at showing up for scratches at the precise time that I want to use both of my hands to type on my laptop computer. She seems to know that I can’t resist her demands for attention.
Today, we head to Edina for the weekend to participate in Friswold family activities surrounding a graveside memorial service for Fred on Saturday. Please keep Cyndie and her family in your hearts and beam your love when you think of them.
In preparation for being away from home for the weekend, I jumped on the lawn tractor as soon as I got home from work yesterday afternoon to tackle the project of cutting the grass shorter than normal for the late-season mowing session. The short cut left a lot of grass clippings behind that I am going to need to sweep up.
In addition to the excessive clippings, the early cold snap and noticeably shorter daylight hours brought on dew that had me cutting some wet grass before I was through. The amount of grass stuck to the bottom of the mower deck was epic. I disconnected the mower from the tractor and struggled mightily to lift the deck for cleaning. It weighed a ton!
The whole project was a little too much for the short time I had available, so the finishing touches will come later. I still may end up needing to cut some areas another time before winter, but I’m hoping most of the mowing is now done for the season.
I’m at that point of wanting to use up the last of the gas in the mower before parking that tractor for the winter.
When I was cutting down by the labyrinth, I had to work around a couple of rocks that had tumbled from one of my recent precarious balance installations.
It’s all good fun until you neglect to pick up the fallen rocks. Those two have returned to ground level and interfered with grass cutting in the vicinity. Far be it from me to stop and get off the tractor to move them. I just forged ahead, cutting around the obstacles to keep going uninterrupted.
During our work down at the labyrinth last week, I took a picture of the center boulders and the miscellaneous additions scattered around them.
It wasn’t getting much attention during our sessions of adding rocks to the path borders, but it is the center point destination of the journey inward, after all.
The future star of the labyrinth garden, that maple tree we transplanted to the middle, will someday, long after I’m gone, tower over the paths.
Maybe by that time, the shade it will provide can dissuade the grass from growing so fast beneath its branches.
I will be happy if we’ve already made the last cut of labyrinth grass for the season. We will be making tracks in snow down there again before too long.
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Three Trees
Cyndie sent me this image yesterday and what caught my eye was the combination of three of the trees we have planted in our time here were all in the frame.
On the left is a crab apple in blossom.
On the right is a hydrangea that Cyndie planted beside her labyrinth. When we moved the gazebo last year, that tree needed to be relocated to the opposite perimeter.
In the background is a maple that we moved from beneath one of our big old maples a short distance away to the east. That little maple offspring is now all by itself in the center of the labyrinth.
All three trees have gone through a lot in these new locations. The hydrangea is showing some green this spring, but we think it is a last gasp before the end. We were thrilled to see it didn’t appear to look shocked after the last transplantation, but then, later in the summer, a limb dropped off and revealed a spongy wound that showed little sign of healthy life.
I didn’t expect to see any leaves this spring, so what did sprout has me curious to see what another year might bring.
The most rewarding of the three is that maple. It was our fourth try to get a maple of that size to survive the trauma of the move to the middle of the labyrinth. I like to imagine what it will look like in a hundred years when it towers over the circuitous garden.
I hope to live long enough to see what a 20-year-old tree looks like in the labyrinth.
In the meantime, we are thoroughly enjoying all of them, just the way they are each day.
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Final Touches
With the big job of moving the gazebo done, thanks to our kids’ help, Cyndie and I made some final tweaks yesterday to complete the new setup. As so often occurs, a plan with one thing in mind expands to several others that need to happen first, to reach the ultimate goal.
Our main objectives were to level the base beneath the bench seat and move the hydrangea tree by transplanting it to a different spot around the labyrinth. We quickly agreed that the place where we put a gracefully rotating section of a tree trunk to stand as a visual attraction would be ideal for the hydrangea.
That old trunk was starting to disintegrate anyway, under the combined pressure of many woodpeckers and natural decay. When we struggled to pick it up, we discovered it hadn’t lost as much mass as appearance led us to suspect, but it looked beat up enough that we didn’t feel bad booting it from its prominent spot.
In the image above, you can see the trunk is now farther out on the left. The hydrangea tree is front and center, garnished with a fresh mulch of wood chips I made on Friday.
Before we transplanted the tree, we wanted to have water available, so I needed to get a hose and turn on the spigot up at the house. That required that the four-way splitter that was removed from the spigot last fall needed to be found. I’m sure we thought we were being obvious when we stowed it away eight months ago.
I was proud of myself when I remembered to grab a level for the bench at the same time I was retrieving a hose from the shop garage. Unfortunately, I needed to send Cyndie back up to find the hose splitter for the spigot.
While she was gone, I trimmed the golden weigela bushes that were on either side of the bench, and now being crowded by the gazebo.
Relocating the hydrangea tree was the most rewarding, as that completely opened up the primary access to the gazebo and bench, which also just happens to serve as an archway entrance to one of our trails into the woods.
It looks odd to no longer see the gazebo in its old spot above the round pen, but we are very happy with the new location beside the labyrinth where it is bound to get much more use.
In addition, this opens up the old spot to easier cutting and raking for hay. We have connected with neighbors who were thrilled with the opportunity to cut and bale our fields for their growing herd of llamas. For a while there, we were a little worried that all the effort we had put into improving our fields would be lost if the weeds were given a chance to return unchallenged.
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Boulders Rocking
While we were standing around the center of labyrinth Wednesday night, I glanced at the big boulders and immediately sensed something seemed different. One of them seems to be settling into an increased lean away from the other. It comes as no surprise, since the soil is so incredibly saturated around here. 
It has me wondering what it will be like this winter when the ground freezes. Will the excess water in the surface soil create more in the way of heaving? Could those boulders get pushed over on their sides?
Maybe when the tree finally gets established, we can get rid of the boulders altogether and let the maple take their place.
What do I mean by we ? By the time that happens, I probably won’t be around anymore and those decisions will likely be someone else’s to make.
For this moment, I am going to work on tending to the boulders to the best of my ability, while also finding a way to adjust my attitude so that I will accept the unexpected results that nature serves up.
I’m sure hoping that nature will serve up a healthy and vibrant transplanted tree. If that happens, I will find it much less concerning if/when the boulders shift into a new and different orientation from the one with which we started.
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Trying Again
Despite a strong inclination I have had to just shut up about the tree transplanting —at least until we finally meet with success in this one particular spot— I can’t stop myself from reporting the story. We have waited for most of the summer to pull out the previous dead tree from the center of the labyrinth, even though it was long ago obvious it hadn’t survived.
There was no hurry, because our plan for the next attempt was to wait until the trees drop their leaves before trying again.
The trees have dropped their leaves.
Earlier in the summer, when we knew we would need to try again, I searched through the saplings beneath the magnificent maple tree that has been my inspiration all along. I like envisioning what one of the offspring of that beauty will look like in the middle of the labyrinth garden when it reaches the same maturity of years.
I selected and marked a tree that I liked. Then we waited.
Yesterday was the day we picked to execute our fourth try at transplanting one of our maple trees to the center of the labyrinth. Cyndie dug out the hole in preparation and when I got home from work, we set about the challenging task of extricating our selection from the spot where it originated.
It didn’t want to come out easily.
With daylight fading, we finally wrested our new hope from the earth’s grasp. Using a wheelbarrow, we transported the tree to the labyrinth and slid it into the hole.
With all the tender loving care we could muster, we prepared the new home for this tree. Now we wait. Nature needs to do the rest.
And if it doesn’t take, I’m just going to keep trying, all the while debating whether I will do so covertly, or choose to continue chronicling the possible repetition of failures.
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Four Years
I was reviewing the “Previous Somethings” archive for some posts that I published four years ago and came upon a picture that means so much to me. During our very first visit in 2012 to see this property with our realtor, I was so overwhelmed by the experience that I hardly took any pictures.
This is one of the few I had for remembering what we had seen, to help me describe the place to family and friends. We had walked a short loop of the trails and I dropped behind Cyndie and Patti while dizzily trying to comprehend what I was experiencing. The place was beyond my wildest imaginings for us.
I came to my senses for a moment and remembered my camera. I captured Cyndie and Patti walking in the distance on a mowed path through one of the fields.
They are walking in a spot that today is about where the entrance to the labyrinth garden is, on their left. The tall weeds on the right are now what we call the Back Pasture, surrounded by a fence.
These are some recent shots of how that spot looks now.
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I get a shiver thinking about that first impression and our visions of the possibilities, combined with the realization of all that has come to be in the four years since.
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Not Much
I moved the trail cam over the weekend and am not happy with the results. I wanted to try a more open area so there would be less branch clutter in the foreground of the view.
I chose the labyrinth garden.
I’m not sure why, but the result was picture after picture with no discernible activity. Over a hundred in two days.
Birds, maybe?
There were surprisingly few images during darkness. However, we did get a tiny glimpse of one animal that was conspicuously absent from all the images captured when we had the camera stationed on the trail in the woods…
Shy little bugger, she. That was all the further she moved into the field of view at 4:30 in the morning.
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Relative Something 