Granted, this has been a fabulous spring for rhododendrons, but I’ve been particularly awed this year by the display put forth by the monster rhodo that is up to the second story of my house.
I can claim no part whatsoever in the success of this plant. I’ve never fed it or (obviously!) pruned it. The most I’ve done is weed out the various tree saplings that invariably end up taking root and poking up through the branches of the rhodo.
What in your garden is flourishing through benign neglect?
I have a night-blooming jasmine that I transplanted from the side of the garage to a corner of our backyard.
The thing is seriously out of control. It’s about touching the neighbor’s eaves. I’m going to have to get a landscaper or someone out to trim it, because I have no idea how or where to start.
But it smells so pretty when it blooms.
That rhodo is gorgeous!
I have a bank of succulents which love a good neglect and have rewarded me by flowering just a few weeks after being planted. I also have a big bed of violets which I have done nothing but casually glance at for four years straight.
We, too, have a monster rhodie that stands two stories high. We have all these weird but neat little hobbit-nooks in our house. This is a view out a tiny hobbit window at the very peak of the roof. Our bed faces it; there’s this lovely green, leafy, shady feeling looking out the window there, and when the rhodie is blooming, it’s gorgeous.
On either side of the monster rhodie are two monster cedars (?) of some kind. We had an arborist come to take out one that was damaged in a bad storm. Luckily, the two in the front were undamaged, and he said they were the two tallest of this variety he had ever seen.
On either side of the cedars are two monster lilacs, also each nearly two stories high and about twelve feet wide. One of 'em’s starting to crowd the driveway, but I love it and don’t want to trim it into submission.
We’ve got a fifteen-foot-high privet hedge running around one side and the back of the backyard that provides a visual barrier from neighbors on two sides, several giant pie cherry and plum trees on the other side, and a veritable fortress of wild Oregon blackberries running through the back privet hedge. I put in some cala, tiger, and stargazer lilies a couple years back, and am happy to see those come pluckily back in spades every year. We keep weeds hacked back, but pretty much everything is left entirely to itself.
One of my very favorite things about this sweet little house is how cool and green and secluded it feels all year 'round. The backyard is like this lush little secret garden. My father-in-law grumps about everything needing to be hacked back so you can see the house better, but that’s exactly what I don’t want!
It is a really cute house though, so maybe we’ll be forced to do it before we put it on the market :(. If so I will probably cry all day afterwards.
NajaNivea, don’t know where you’re located, but the tree to the left of the beautiful rhodo looks like it might be an Eastern Redcedar (which isn’t a cedar, but a juniper). I love the hobbit window and its view!
I feel guilty dissing my rhodo, but I wish it were either that gorgeous pale pink yours is, or the deep blood red referred to in the opening of Rebecca (the book, not the movie).
Ivylass, I’ve never smelled nightblooming jasmine in person, only at Bath and Body Works, but I sure love it there. I’d love to encounter the real thing.
Oh! That’s the one. It makes sense, there’s another juniper of a different variety in the back yard. I tend to forget it’s even there because the neighbors have a friggen’ ginormous redwood that’s so big it has appropriated the poor juniper in our yard. It keeps struggling along, though–you can see the branches poking out from under the big tree!
I love that it’s just a shade lighter than the lilacs; I don’t know if they were matched that way on purpose, but it’s pretty neat when they explode, one right after the other.
Not yet…all of my stuff goes to shit unless I treat it like babies (really, they’re weed magnets). But this is the third year for most of my plants and they look super healthy all of a sudden, so I hope this means they’re established enough for me to ignore them for a while.
If that Prairie Rose (living in sloped gumbo) doesn’t stop volunteering itself, I’m going to get very stern with it.
I woke up from a dead sleep this morning with the thought “arborvitae!”
Way to go, subconscious! Workin’ over-time… 
The neighbor doesn’t trim the wild grapes or anything else. The random weed trees and vines are huge. I noticed that the grapes that climbed the tv tower and covered part of the roof for a few years have finally ruined the shingles.
It’s not benign neglect. It’s Darwinian Gardening.
Wow… that’s some rhodo! It must be ancient too, given the size… the last time I saw one that big, it was roughly 50 yrs old.
We’ve got a lilac bush in the backyard that is absolutely stunning, and that we estimate to be approx 25 yrs old. It’s nearly up to the 2nd story and it bloomed very abundantly this year despite the fact that we moved in too late last year to prune it properly, not to mention the years and years of neglect under the previous owners (who, according to the neighbours, were drug dealers… a particular segment of society not particularly known for winning gardening awards).
We’ve also got monster clumps of irises all over the property, one of which even survived being uprooted for three days when our drain was being cleared of roots and relined. I’m quite impressed by how huge they are, given that we haven’t done a thing for them since we moved in.
Lovely rhodos! I love the description of NajaNivea’s house and garden–it sounds enchanting, cool and green and private. Ideal, I’d say.
I took a census of the rhodos on our lot and came up with 13 (!) and they’re all in bloom or just about to. Last year and the year before were ‘meh’, but this spring/summer, they’re glorious. The weather must be right again for a good show. Previous dwellers planted them, and I’ve done a bit of tidying, but I don’t water or fertilise them and still they thrive. There were 15 at one point; I found two skeletons as I cleared out the most recent previous owner’s neglect. That wasn’t so benign; Pacific coast and mild weather meant the place was choked with stuff, some wanted, most not.
I do like leaving a patch of yard just to see what comes up. Some call them weeds; I call them wild flowers. I have a big pot that is brimming over with wild sweetpeas–they just sort of decided that would be a good place to grow when the previous annual I’d put in there died off. They are so lovely and full, filling it out and spilling over, that it really looks like I’d intended it.
It’s very strong, very sweet. I also have Confederate jasmine twining in my chain link fence. I don’t do a thing to it on the two days a year it gets below freezing…I just let it go, and every once in awhile I’ll go out and train more of the tendrils through the fence.
My daylilies are thriving on neglect. My spiderwort is too, which is not surprising as it is a weed. This year the roses were lovely, no thanks to me. Ditto the stokes aster.
I am totally in love with this place. The people that owned it before us were arborists, so there are some really neat things scattered around the yard. One of my favorites, aside from the lilacs, is a Japanese snowbell tree that rains thousands of pretty little white flowers in the spring.
It’s really too bad I don’t know how to take care of anything–but it all seems to be doing just fine on its own.
A good garden should be somewhat self-maintaining: it’s called permaculture.
