Garden Muses: A Small Toronto Gardening Services Company Blog

28.8.16

Baby Point, Toronto front garden renovation

Why are "decorative white rocks" considered decorative?

Travelling across the city from client to client, I see many strange and wonderful gardening and landscaping materials, techniques, and structures executed in interesting and intriguing ways. Then I see the use of "white decorative rocks/stones" and I die a little inside.

Source: http://californiaquarryproducts.com/decorative_landscape_rock.php

I put the words in quotes because that's how this eye-jarring natural stone is marketed and sold at better big box stores. I always wonder when and how in natural landscapes would these stones be found. Of course, most city gardens are contrivances, put together according to the owner's whims ("no maintenance" comes to mind immediately) and bank account balance. But, still, why would anyone buy and put these unnatural-looking natural stones down? (I'll refer to them as "DWR" from now on.)

This thought entered my mind when I first reviewed this west-end Toronto front garden with the new owners. They just bought the house and weren't enamored with the front landscaping that was "flash-frozened" circa the 1950s with the "foundation plantings" comprising of a meat-balled cedar, senile ground-hugging junipers, the ever-ubiquitous and scaled-attacked "Emerald Gaiety" euonymous and, most confusing, a "baby" Colorado Blue Spruce crammed in tight for good measure.

And to top it off (actually, on top of the soil) was a yard or so of DWR acting as a mulch of some sort!

The owners wanted an updated look. I was concerned with the continuous pruning of the spruce that was shoehorned into this tiny garden bed.

Baby Point front garden renovation before

(I blogged about this example of the lack of math in the garden in a previous post called "Do the math! Nah, I'm not expecting it to grow much larger..." The mantra of putting the "right plant in the right location" didn't exactly resonate with the previous owners. A mature Colorado Blue Spruce grows to a mature size of easily 50 feet tall by 20 feet wide.)

Here are other "before" pictures showing the bed around the very mature oak tree:

Baby Point front garden renovation before

Baby Point Toronto front garden renovation before

(The red disposal bin was used for the extensive construction going on in the backyard and the pink twine was mainly used to prevent the workers not to walk on or throw their cigarette butts or coffee cups in the proposed new bed. No, seriously!)

The bulk of my time was removing as much of the DWR that was visible or just beneath the soil. Talk about a tedious task! I find "rock mulch" whether it's the size of pea gravel all the way to larger river rocks utterly useless to prevent weeds from growing, unless a good 6 inches of topsoil is removed to prevent weed and tree seeds from germinating. And which landscaping company is going to do that?

I planted mainly perennials once the existing shrubs (except one) were removed. The owners preferred dark burgundy or purple-coloured perennials so I chose other plants with yellow or chartreuse-coloured leaves to complement and contrast the purple foliage. This front area gets a little bit of direct sun in the morning but is under dapple shade for most of the day under the huge oak.

I used some of my favourite shade-tolerant stalwarts like "June" hosta, Japanese Forest Grass, "Black Negligee" snakeroot or bugbane, "Obsidian" coral bells and "Jack Frost" Siberian bugloss. The owners added some purple petunias for instant colour until frost arrives.

They (owners) couldn't part with the euonymous so it was spared from being shovel pruned.

Here are the corresponding "after" pictures:

Baby Point front garden renovation after

Baby Point Toronto front garden renovation after

Baby Point front garden renovation after by

Baby Point Toronto front garden renovation after

I still shudder to think what would have happened if that spruce was kept!

16.8.16

Playter Estates Toronto late summer backyard cleanup

Backyard weeding in the North Broadview and Danforth area

Summer is all too quickly coming to an end but the weeding never stops, it seems. Last week's extreme heat and humidity here in Toronto have only made weeds explode in size and numbers!

I was recently hired to cleanup this small backyard near the Broadview and Danforth Avenue area near downtown Toronto. While these garden beds were not large, they were covered with Silver Lace vines (Polygonum aubertii) and mature Lamb's Quarters (Chenopodium album) weeds. And, yes, a Manitoba Maple (Acer negundo) sapling thrown in as shown in the first picture below!

Playter Estates Toronto backyard cleanup before

Playter Estates Toronto backyard cleanup after

Playter Estates Toronto backyard clean up before

Playter Estates Toronto backyard clean up after

Broadview Danforth Toronto backyard clean up before

Broadview Danforth Toronto backyard clean up after

Toronto Playter Estates backyard weeding before

Toronto Playter Estates backyard weeding after

Toronto Playter Estates backyard clean up before

Toronto Playter Estates backyard clean up after

Toronto Playter Estates backyard weeding before

Toronto Playter Estates backyard weeding after

28.7.16

Leslieville, Toronto front garden clean up

Where's Waldo? He's big and green with long arms...

I have to give you credit, dear reader, if you've been keeping up with all these "garden cleanup" posts I've been publishing. I admit, they're usually very boring so today I'm going to make yet another garden cleanup post more of a game.

So, let's play the garden maintenance version of "Where's Waldo?" below.

Here are two pictures of the same Leslieville, Toronto front garden which needed, ahem, a little rehab. There are two specimen landscape trees somewhere.

Can you spot them?

Leslieville Toronto front garden summer cleanup before

Toronto Leslieville front garden summer cleanup before

Was it a challenge? Give up?

For several hours, I removed 4 Chinese Elm saplings (can 10 foot tall young weed trees be considered "saplings"?), 2 White mulberry saplings, a very dead ancient juniper, dozens of very mature Dog Strangling vines, Triffid-like burdock, masses of petty spurge and more weeds I forgot about.

Here are the two corresponding "after" pictures.

Yes, it's the same garden.

Leslieville Toronto front garden summer cleanup after

Toronto Leslieville front garden summer cleanup

If you spotted "Waldo", the Weeping Nootka Falsecypress (Chamaecyparis nootkatensis 'Pendula' ) his sidekick, the ubquitous "Bloodgood" Japanese maple in the "before" pictures, you got darn better eyesight than I do!

Here are more of the same, from different angles. I guess I saved this front garden from being a small woodlot in about ten years.

Toronto Leslieville front garden summer cleanup before

Toronto Leslieville front garden summer cleanup after

Leslieville Toronto front garden summer cleanup before

Leslieville Toronto front garden summer cleanup after

Leslieville Toronto front garden summer cleanup

Leslieville Toronto front garden summer clean up before

Leslieville Toronto front garden summer clean up after

18.7.16

Do the math!

Nah, I'm not expecting it to grow much larger...

Better late than never, I'm starting a new series of posts dealing with "the wrong plant, wrong location" practice I see all too often during my travels across Toronto. Below is a wonderful and particularly egregious example of the triumph of hope over experience:

Oh, Christmas tree!

Firstly, just ignore the white rock "mulch" under the Colorado Blue Spruce. Whether you think it looks ghastly and outdated (it is), let's rather focus on the where this youngster of a tree is planted.

To our left is the only paved access from the front door to the driveway and backyard. The width is about three feet.

In the foreground is a shared driveway about 15 feet wide.

And, yes, there's a huge mature oak about 6 feet behind (you can see its trunk).

Now consider the typical mature size of this spruce: 50-75 feet high by 10-20 feet wide.

Let's spend a few moments doing the math.

As your accountant might say when you present her with incomplete receipts in a shoe box, "the math doesn't add up." Or to borrow that infamous line from the movie "Jaws", "you're gonna need a bigger set of clippers." What, you don't enjoy being caressed by such a spruce on the way to and from the car, carrying groceries into the house, lugging out the hose, etc.?

13.7.16

A front garden makeover in York Mills/St. Andrews: Natives? Non-natives? Does it really matter?

Re-thinking a Toronto shade garden

Sometimes a new garden project develops out of the blue. Here's what was growing recently in this Toronto front garden: areas covered by Yellow Archangel (Lamiastrum galeobdolon) in medium shade.

Lamiastrum galeobdolon (Yellow Archangel)
York Mills front garden renovation

For anyone familiar with this groundcover, you'll know that it "likes to move quickly" which is a euphemism for being mildly invasive. And I find the leaves stink as well. But if you want quick coverage, Yellow ~~archdevil~~ archangel could work, maybe too successfully.

When I first visited this location in the St. Andrews/York Mills area of Toronto about two months ago, the client was asking for bids to remove large patches of groundcover and replacing that with new sod.

Another landscaper/gardener came by before and offered to rototill the Lamiastrum and put in new Kentucky bluegrass sod.

Now, let that sink in for a minute.

I'll wait.

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Okay, I'm back. The goal was to sod over a lot of the area currently which is, to be nice, over-run by the lamiastrum. Obviously (maybe not to some "professionals") the existing groundcover should be removed. Or was the strategy simply laying down rolls of sod on top of chopped up stems of lamiastrum (wonderfully propagated when you think about it)?

When did rototilling become the new method of weeding? This is not the first time I've come across this reasoning, unfortunately.

Does this make sense to you? It didn't to me and I pointed out to the client the eventual failure of trying to grow sod in soil that was full of weeds (in this case, nicely-sliced up lamiastrum stems) and in, at best, dappled shade.

Instead, perhaps the lamiastrum could be confined to certain areas that were very shaded and dry (in which case, it's actually doing its job as an effective groundcover in "tough-to-grow anything" spots) and removed from a prominent area more visible by the neighbours. Space for an expanded shade garden, then, could be created for the introduction of shade-tolerant perennials and shrubs.

At this point, I was more concerned with not having a rototiller ripping tree roots and destroying the soil structure than "winning" new business. I guess "working with the site" doesn't carry much meaning when you have plenty of gas-powered machines rearing to go and loads of rolls of sod on the truck.

Literally, "landscraping" comes to mind.

I guess my thoughts made sense with the homeowner so she hired me to create a new garden from this:

York Mills St. Andrews
front garden renovation before

to eventually this:

Toronto York Mills St. Andrews
front garden renovation after

Here's the same bed from another angle. I did leave a strip of the Lamiastrum on the left side because I felt it was on the neighbour's property. I would be ideal if all of it was removed but that's between the two homeowners.

After removing the groundcover and many turf seedlings (small clumps of grass), I mixed in many bags of composted cow manure to increase the organic matter in the soil. Sad to say that no worms were found anywhere.

York Mills St. Andrews Toronto
front garden renovation before

The question of what type of new plants should be put in, I find, is usually not tricky. Most clients don't know or care and just want me to "make it pretty/tidy/like someone gave a damn." This client, however, had a different vision and preferred mostly native species but open to the idea of "non-natives." That was fortunate because the supply of plants for sale in July is dwindling at the garden centres. Many times, my plant choices are sold out so substitutes are picked instead.

It's a version of the mantra "you get what you get and you don't get upset" I repeated to my children when they were young (I still do repeat it naively) and to more than a few clients (nicer wording though) when we try to buy plants in the dead of summer.