Badscapes

We often come across gardens where the previous work is incomplete, shoddy or carelessly finished. Here we have a garden with some yews that have been planted too high and backfilled with construction fill. The soil is compacted heavy clay. This is typical of new construction sites where heavy machinery has been used to construct the house. You can see the Yew (Taxus spp) needles starting to yellow already.

Spring Urns

Sometimes a client just needs to freshen up the space. This particular client successfully sold the house this spring. It is not often that the gardener moves with the client to the new house but in this case we are really happy to have a customer for life.

The beauty of a dry stack wall

People always ask me about the difference between dry stack walls and mortared walls. The example pictured here is a dry stack wall meaning it is built without mortar or concrete footings. This wall has been built using natural stone. One nice thing about dry stack stone walls is the fact that they can be rebuilt from time to time. This particular wall has been rebuilt four times in thirty years! We rebuilt this wall the summer before last and it has held up quite well. PS If you look closely you can see that we rebuilt this wall with hand tools, look for chisel marks on the top right (no loud gas powered saw on this project).

Fall colour at the Lewis Residence

Busy season = no posts! Now I can start posting some of the great shots from this season. Stay tuned.
This garden was installed back in 2006. It is great to see the boston ivy (Parthenocissus tricuspidata) completely hiding the fence.