So the values of the home and the mortgage are converging, the home-equity genie is back in the bottle and the yard needs a complete makeover. What’s a recession-sick homeowner with spring fever to do?
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When a garden gets overgrown and raggedy, it’s more than just a case of plants looking sick. The bigger problem is the loss of structure, of the “bones” that make a garden pleasing to the eye.
Here is advice for sprucing up the yard on a budget while lowering its long-term maintenance demands. The fix involves you: The more energy you can put into it, the more cost-effective and rewarding will be the results. It may become so absorbing that you forget all about the recession blues.
1. Simplify
Like many other aspects of life, gardening has become loaded with too many choices in recent years. That has led to a cornucopia of great plants but also to gardens that are inherently more fussy and demanding.
By scaling back the number of plants, especially perennials and annuals, we can tone down the landscape without making it dull. If you take out a tree, as landscape designer Gordon Hayward points out, you don’t have to replace it. Maybe, for example, you have created too many flower beds, and you should return one or two to lawn (though this is best done by seed in late summer).
Here are four other ways to simplify.
Boxwood. Reinforce paths and other garden edges visually with a neat, well-defined bed, two feet wide, containing boxwood, either as a hedge or as specimens spaced several feet apart and interplanted with a tidy ground cover. There are varieties of boxwood that are as pretty as English box but not as slow-growing or difficult, including Green Beauty, Vardar Valley and Justin Brouwers.
Editing. Don’t be afraid to take out elements that add nothing to the garden. Landscape architect Katia Goffin recalls a garden where a flagstone patio needed resetting but was the wrong shape and interfered with the lines of the garden. It was removed.
Pots. People tend to have too many small pots on their stoops and patios. Replace them with fewer, large containers to unclutter an area and give it focus. “Two beautiful pots, [on] either side of the front door with eye-catching annuals, would do a lot,” Hayward says.
Plant removal. Simplifying may also mean removing high-maintenance plants, or avoiding them in a new project. Larry Weaner, whose company in Glenside, Pa., is known for its sustainable landscape designs, has a checklist of what to banish:
*perennials that need dividing every few years.
*plants that need staking.
*plants prone to insect and disease problems.
*plants that require more rainfall than normal to flourish.
*plants that require constant trimming and pruning to keep them in their allotted space.
You know what he’s talking about. Some that come to mind include ill-chosen and ill-sited rose varieties, herbaceous peonies, irises, lilies, most crab apples and astilbes.
2. Rejuvenate
The silver lining to the recession? The chance to take control of your overgrown yard by getting out there and bringing it back to life yourself.
Stephen Anderton put it succinctly in his 1999 book, “Rejuvenating a Garden”: “Good gardening can be very expensive or extraordinarily cheap. If you have plenty of time and energy, it is amazing what you can achieve with very little money.”
The first step is to reduce or remove vegetation. The second is to redefine the lines that frame lawns, beds, fence lines, paths and patios. Together, these measures will yield a neater, cleaner garden that works better aesthetically and bestows a profound sense of satisfaction that transcends the momentary aches and pains of the work. You don’t have to tackle the whole garden at once.
Some aspects of renovation may need intervention by experts whose advice can save money in the long run. A tree that has died from neglect can cost thousands of dollars to remove. Remember that tree work is hazardous and best left to professionals.
Trees and shrubs typically grow one to two feet per year before reaching maturity. Often, a 12-year-old plant is twice the desired size. Sometimes it is obvious when a plant has outgrown its space, such as when it is covering a window or blocks a path. Sometimes the bulkiness is less apparent but needs fixing because a shrub has lost its outline or a patio tree is casting too much shade for the plants beneath it.
Shade trees. Removing the lower branches of shade trees, especially evergreens, is an effective way to lighten the whole plant. This should be done before the tree is mature and must be achieved in a way that allows the wounds to heal. Consult an arborist.
Shade trees should be shaped when young to create a single trunk and an open framework of healthy main branches. This adolescent shaping, called formative pruning, can be done up until a tree is 15 years old, says Peter Deahl, a certified arborist in Sterling, Va. A 10-year-old red maple, for example, may have a dense canopy that can be reduced through formative pruning.
The rules are different for mature shade trees. The leafy branches should be left alone, but the deadwood and dying branches should be removed to keep the tree open and healthy. This should be done every three to five years, Deahl says.
Ornamental trees. The same principles of formative pruning apply, though ornamental trees’ scale allows the homeowner a crack at it. The biggest sin is in cutting back branches to stubs simply to lower the height of a tree. The practice, called topping, will promote rank regrowth and permanent disfigurement.
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Shrubs. You have four options for renovating shrubs, depending on the species. Shrubs may be turned into a mini tree, especially if they have a single trunk before branching. It takes a good eye to see a shrub’s inner tree, so proceed slowly and conservatively. I have seen this done effectively with overgrown burning bushes, arborvitae and yews.
Some shrubs that are given to suckering can be cut to the ground, and they will spring back with vigor and health while reducing their mass. It may take two years for them to look full again. Candidates include forsythia, winter jasmine, flowering quince, red- and yellow-twig dogwoods, abelia, deutzia, spirea and mock orange.
Other shrubs can handle this drastic approach but, as landscape designer and author Gordon Hayward points out, their recovery is slow and painful to look at. It is better to remove or cut back up to a third of the oldest branches each year for three years. This reduces the canopy, opens the plant to light and air, and encourages bushy growth.
The fourth option is to remove the shrub. Overgrown junipers, for example, are difficult to rejuvenate, and some privet hedges are pitifully thin and rank, especially in shade.
Shrub pruning is best done in March before the spring flush of growth. A heavily trimmed shrub will benefit from extra care this year: Water during dry spells and apply a slow-release fertilizer.
Hedges. Hedges large and small, from Leyland cypress to English boxwood, can be reduced in height, but you should make tidy, clean cuts, best achieved with hand pruners, loppers or a pruning saw, rather than electric shears. The cut stems will be shrouded in new growth in a few weeks. While you’re at it, taper the sides of the hedge a little, making it narrower at the top, so that the lower foliage receives sunlight and remains full. Tightly clipped or sheared hedges look good in glossy magazines, but they need two or three cuts per season and are stressed in hot climates.
Edges. Trimmed shrubbery returns space to the garden; clean edges restore harmony. One of the most simple and effective techniques is to define the line where the lawn meets a planting bed through regular edging. Paths and patios. Installing these can be costly, so work with what you’ve got. You can transform a concrete front walk by framing it in brick, cobbles or clean-cut bluestone, Hayward says. If you have a dry-laid brick or flagstone path or patio that has sagged and bowed, you can have it reset at a lower cost than installing a new one, says Katia Goffin, a landscape architect at Scott Brinitzer Design Associates in Arlington, Va. The masonry can be power-washed to look new.
3. Maintain
By simplifying the plantings and turning to lower-maintenance plants, you will reduce the demands of the garden. Here are other steps to diminish the time and money involved in keeping up a landscape.
Weeding. This is the biggest single chore in the garden. Every time you pull a weed, you disturb the soil and bring other weed seeds to the fore to germinate. The conventional solution is mulch, and a thin two-inch layer of organic mulch will keep weeds back and conserve soil moisture. But mulch is generally over-applied, often to the detriment of both the garden and the wallet.
Landscape designer Larry Weaner offers another solution: ground covers. They will grow together and squeeze out the weeds. It’s important to consider the light and soil conditions for a given area so you pick the right ground cover, and buy the smallest plants you can find to reduce the initial cost. Weaner recommends picking ground covers that naturally spread and colonize, rather than clump, so you can reduce the number planted and space them farther apart. Candidates include the white wood aster, lady fern and golden groundsel. Weaner likes to use a variety of ground covers, especially natives, instead of the usual mass plantings of pachysandra or vinca, which can be devastated by diseases induced by flood or drought.
The areas between ground covers are mulched at first, but after the first season “you don’t buy mulch anymore because the plants are the mulch,” says Weaner, who suggests going to a local nature center to see which plants have colonized the ground.
Getting help. Seeing the hidden beauty in an overgrown landscape takes a good eye, and sometimes a trained eye. Many landscape architects and garden designers do consultations, spending an hour or two going over a garden with the owner to suggest improvements. This might cost $200 and does not pay for design plans, construction, plants or anything else. But it can save you a great deal more money in costly mistakes or unnecessary embellishments.
Learning to prune. Big tree work should be left to a reputable arborist, but you can learn how to prune small trees and shrubs and use those skills the rest of your life. For pruning advice, check out the Web site of the International Society of Arboriculture, treesare-good.org; click on “Tree Care Information.”