I really have to get better at photo documentation of the projects around here. This week we tackled one of two overgrown planting beds in front of our house.
Here is what the planting bed looked like when we first had it landscaped. Aren’t those plants cute?
Here’s another view from the upstairs deck. You can barely tell that there are two palm trees in there. The bushes all look lost.
After 6 years and the addition of a sago palm as an accent plant in the front of the bed, the picture isn’t as pretty. The bed closest to the street looks like this.
The one closer to the house is also a big disaster. Sometimes I think that landscapers should be shot. What was he thinking when he put that many plants into the beds? Either start with much bigger plants or warn the homeowner that half of them need to go!
Out came the bypass loppers, the pickax, the chainsaw and the shovel. The two palm trees were planted much too close together. The bigger one needed to move to the back of the bed, and the sago palm which is no longer the size of a tidy houseplant needed to be placed front and center. The variegated Golden Euonymus needed to be replanted. The crepe myrtle was invisible and had to be moved to the back yard. We have been hacking at those plants for years, but we never addressed the main problem – there were just too many of them out there!
I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried to relocate a palm tree. I guess we waited too long. A friend of ours with a nursery said the trees have a small root ball and that they were “easy” to move. Easy is relative, he owns a bobcat. We dug them up by hand… and found out that the fire ant nest there that we thought we had killed was still active. JOY! That was a nasty surprise. Anyway, once we got the root balls dug, it became evident that two people couldn’t budge them an inch.
Why does gardening at the beach require tow straps and a pickup truck? I will never know. The long and short of it is that we had to drag the trees using the truck to their new homes. I wish I captured pictures of this endeavor. It was quite exciting!
In the end, the front island now looks much better. It is still awaiting some pansies and a thick coat of mulch for the winter, but it is almost done! I hope that we didn’t upset the palm trees too much with the relocation.
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