Shame, thy name is shrubbery.

I love my backyard. I love sitting inside and looking out at the eye-high sunflower, I love sitting outside and smelling the cinnamon basil, and I love riding my bike around back after work to park it and admiring the whole big, beautiful thing.

My front yard, however, is a hot damn mess. Aside from two beautiful catalpa trees and a handful of patchy grass, our front yard ‘garden space’ is dominated by several giant, evergreen bushes who, for lack of a real scientific name, I shall refer to as  Woe bushes. Not only are these bushes aesthetically unpleasing, thanks to a series of childhood encounters, I’m fairly sure that they breed ants and jumping spiders. For this reason, and because truly, I couldn’t be arsed, I pretty much ignored them beyond trimming them at arm’s length whenever they grew long enough to touch my leg when coming or going.

Then, our new neighbor decided to trim the bush nearest to his door into something resembling a cute, bonsai-like shrubbery, leaving room underneath for planting and the wheels in my brain began to turn. I admired his new view while finishing Micheal Pollan(swoon)’s Second Nature, and suddenly I found myself armed with borrowed clippers, knee-deep in trimmings filled simultaneously with a deep sense of land-pride and a mounting panic that at any moment ants and spiders would make homes in my hair.

Mid-process

When I first began gardening, I vowed to grow only vegetables and herbs for a variety of reasons including, as I wrote in a journal ‘what’s the point of taking all this time to nurture something if I can’t EAT it in the end?* To that end I originally planned on filling the front with perennial herbs like mint and rosemary. Upon discovering that this particular Woe bush was also infested with poison ivy (of course), however, my plan changed.  I’m still thinking perennials just for ease of care, but am leaning more towards the inedibles like hostas,coleus, corabells (the perennials of my childhood, now that I think about it)

So far.
Nee.

So as you can see, I still have some trimming to do, and some planning. Any ideas?

 

*bodes well for future offspring.