The one with the banana plant in the middle, a six-foot-deep flowerbed at the back of the yard, was obviously a case of “I haven’t weeded back here since the middle of May”. A mess. A jungle.
The other three were “much-much crabgrass and other assorted weeds”, also obviously a product of not having been weeded for weeks.
Much more than 15 minutes of work, IOW. At least a solid weekend’s worth of work to set to rights. Really, overall, considering it was September, it was at the stage where I’d just put the tools back in the garage and go in the house, vowing, “Next year, I’ll keep on top of it…”
In looking at DDG 's input here, and what I hear in my day to day advice in offering help to gardeners, somehow, everyone figures it’s all over come September with the garden. Nope, and nope again! That’s the time to get ahold of weeds, and the mayhem of the past season. It’s the best time for re-evaluating the garden and getting a grip on what works and what doesn’t, and planting perennials for the next year, in most temperate areas. If you keep on top of it NOW, it’s easier in the long run.
One point I bring up in teaching people is that the tradition of Fall gardening doesn’t exist in the British Tradition, which is the default in the US, because the daylight conditions are not the same as ours. There isn’t a tradition of Fall gardening there, but, in many US climates, Fall gardening is better than spring gardening for perennials.
This isn’t in the scope of this thread, but does hinge upon it as to what the Op’s gardener was expecting at this fall time. If there is enough interest, start a thread on that particular; I’d try to answer those particulars.
That’s the thing – we’re not Better Homes and Gardens, we’re not Garden Design. The point of this feature is to show real people’s gardens, and real people’s gardens aren’t groomed within an inch of their lives. (Elelle – you’ve seen a few issues – those are the shoots we’ve gotten with a two-page memo to the photographer for what we want, and nothing more to the gardener than “the photographer will be showing up at this time on this date.”) The lesson to take away from this isn’t, I don’t think, that I need to issue punch lists to gardeners before the shoot. We’ve done 20 shoots, and 19 of them have yielded plenty of usable photos, so most people seem to grok the concept of “I may want to tidy up a bit before the photographer gets here.” The point is that I fucked up by okaying this shoot, due to my failure to scrutinize the test shots carefully enough, and due to my stupidity in not realizing that the person who said this would be a good profile doesn’t know enough about native gardens to realize she was getting scammed.
All my own damn fault, IOW – thus the depth of my wrath.
ScareyFaerie it was.like that but less mature, and the giant shrub is missing. Given a year it could look like that. They did have a nice wall in the background, not cinderblock.
I’m being reminded of a story I liked. The Secret Garden
That garden has been lovingly ignored for the last 18 months, and will probably continue to be ignored for a while yet. Then we’ll hire a skip, get a bunch of friends round and cut everything down to ground level. Then see how long it takes for the brambles to start growing again.
We used to have a fence around the garden but the neighbour took it down while we were on holiday and replaced it with the ugly breezeblock wall that’s there now.
When I was in college I spent my summers painting houses. One job we did was for a woman who was planning to run for some political office that year. She hired us to paint the front of her house, because she assumed newspaper photographers would be taking pictures of her house. The rest of the paint was in deplorable shape, but the front looked good!
That doesn’t sound nuts, exactly; it has a certain low cunning, as suits someone who cares about image more than substance. Now, whether ignoring substance is insane is a different debate…
Oh, Twicks, I am sorry for you . That WAS a disappointing garden for photos. Since I’ve never lived (or gardened) in Texas, I can’t tell you how much was weeds, but still…
That looks like some of our native wetland plantings - but only those that we choose to have “natural” - we mix all the species instead of clumping them. We don’t call those gardens. Whatever grass is running through that mess was awfully similar to Quackgrass. With that concentration of Quack, I head for the Roundup. In my own yard, I’d devote a month or so of evenings to pulling it out.
Heck she could have al least taken the dead leaves out… there was even a terra-cotta pot with a dead plant in the middle!
Nope, that made me feel good - we are doing OK up here, even in raingardens in a drought year!
I thought the photo with the flowers around the spreading tree might be salvagable, if it wasn’t blown up too much.
