It was winter when we bought our farm back in 1962. A clean white blanket of snow hid the hideousness of the yard, so we had no idea that the outside of the farmhouse was in as bad shape as the inside. When the snows finally melted, we discovered broken down fences, dead shrubs, ropes of poison ivy, stacks of old tires and piles of trash in every direction.
Our top priority was the house, however. A building abandoned for six years quickly begins to fall apart, so we were just too busy making the farmhouse habitable to worry about the surrounding landscape. Sweeping up the dead birds, poisoning the very live rats and getting heat, electricity and plumbing in working order was essential.
I don't mind wielding a hammer or a paintbrush, but a gardener would much rather have a trowel or a shovel in her hand when warm weather comes, so by June I just had to get outside. What I faced was a totally dead hedge of hemlocks, mildewed lilacs, giant burdocks, one handsome sugar maple and a great many locust trees marching up the road.
I was unfamiliar with locust trees and all winter they'd reminded me of the boney, crooked skeletons of the trees in Chas Adams cartoons, but by June they'd lost their eerie black look and were clothed in a delicate green and perfumed white blossoms.
As for flowering shrubs, there was only a single scraggly forsythia bush whose branches had scratched plaintively on the kitchen window all winter. There were many beautiful laurels in the woods, but they proved impossible to transplant successfully. Honeysuckle bushes, which were also plentiful, made a poor substitute, but beggars can't be choosers.
It was many years before I could contemplate such luxuries as nursery-raised flowering shrubs, but when that day finally came I couldn't wait to tackle a landscaping project that had been an eyesore for years, a bank too steep to mow just below the pond.
Bedstraw, bindweed and burdocks were just the "B" weeds. The bank also contained milkweed, vetch, grasses and a dozen other weeds. That spring Hank sprayed Roundup, a systemic herbicide that kills everything in sight. What wasn't in sight was a grid of woodbine roots under the soil.
Once I'd ripped them out and smoothed up the area I still needed to figure out a barrier for the top of the bank before I could go shrub shopping. Since we still had railroad ties left over from other projects, that was the easiest solution. Once laid, they were level enough to enable me to mow the grass above the bank, balancing one side of the mower on their surface. A precarious bit of maneuvering, but works well if one concentrates.
At last it was time for the fun part, picking out the shrubs. I'd been pouring over the catalogs all winter, but those glossy photographs can be so deceiving that I'd decided the best way to choose my bushes was to go to a nursery and see them in the flesh, so to speak.
This past spring I took my own photos of the bank and the individual shrubs as they came into bloom, but I see that I don't have room to show them today, so you'll have to wait for my next column to learn all the things I learned about flowering shrubs.
