A Visit To The Ridge Top Garden

With Destruction In Mind

It was a perfect sunny day, clear blue skies, no wind and a warm 65 degrees. No rain or snow was in the diagnosis for the next 24 hours. A perfect day for killing. The Lamium galeobdolon commonly called Yellow Archangel has been taking over the ridge top garden. That is really an under statement of the facts. It was time to put a stop to it.

With such great quantities and a dense mat forming root system, spraying it is the only real option. The good thing is it is pretty much an evergreen. It can be sprayed after everything else has gone dormant.

A certain gardener here keeps expanding the garden's boundaries despite my pleas to concentrate on infill. Now that I work full time and have a garden of my own there is less time and energy to help in the wild cultivated gardens next door. The lamium takes over everything and she sees no blank space. The only option it seems is to expand. Come spring she is going to see a half an acre of blank space inside the boundaries of the existing garden.

More bulbs can go where the lamium was. These are new fall blooming crocus planted in the annex expansion. The garden has since expanded beyond the annex.

I had another murder in mind when I went over there. The Oriental Bittersweet on the arbor is an invasive species. I have seen whole mountains up here completely infested with it. Ours gets frozen in bloom often enough that it has not spread by seed as much as they are capable of. Still, the vine was too big, too boring and a pain to deal with. I cut the trunks of the vine at the ground. Come spring when it sprouts, the stumps will get sprayed. Time to go.

The Blue Pot with Bamboo stands behind the arbor. I need to get rid of those ugly bricks and lattice behind the pot. It's on the list of chores. It's a list with no end.

From the Posh Estate to the Wild Cultivated Gardens, my gardening runs to extremes.