[ Lost in the Landscape ]

hiding from the neighbors

We have new neigh­bors imme­di­ately behind the house next door. One of their first acts was to erect this gonzo back deck.

The pre­vi­ous owner was a house-bound woman who for the last twenty years of her life lived mostly indoors. Her back fence stopped at the prop­erty line and was six feet high. We never saw her, she never saw us.

The new own­ers, a young cou­ple, appar­ently didn’t care for the big dark fence get­ting in the way of their view. And they appar­ently didn’t think their back yard was large enough since the new deck juts out many feet into a city ease­ment. I’m sure they have a great view of the ocean. But using the equa­tion, I can see them = They can see us, I’m cer­tain they also have a tremen­dous view of my back yard.

There are a few islands of pri­vacy. This black bam­boo pro­vides a lit­tle bit of screening–if you’re stand­ing in just the right spot.

But this view from the bed­room win­dow shows that the isn’t much pri­vacy from much of the gar­den. I planted a Dr. Hurd man­zanita in front of the bam­boo, before the new neigh­bors moved in. Once it hits its twelve foot tar­get, it’ll help pro­vide some shel­ter. But being a man­zanita it’s tak­ing its good old time get­ting larger. Had I known we’ve have this pri­vacy issue I’d have planted some­thing faster grow­ing, maybe a desert willow.

A few things get in the way of plant­ing more large plants on the prop­erty line. There’s a buried drain–not the best thing to plant a small tree over. This is also the the south­ern edge to the prop­erty. A tree would pro­vide some shel­ter, but it would also shade a gar­den pop­u­lated with sun-loving plants and home­own­ers. Also, the pre­vi­ous own­ers of our house installed a large fish­pond in what would be the most wel­come spot for a small tree.

We’re still try­ing to think of what to do. Until we have a larger plan in place, we’re let­ting some plants get taller than we oth­er­wise might. This mys­tery shrub came with the house. Although it’s grow­ing too close to a fence to let it get very large, we’re still let­ting it grow taller. There’s one of these plants in the canyon nearby and the best idea I have is that if it’s native it might be a Pacific wax myr­tle (Morella (for­merly Myr­tica) cal­i­for­nica), but I think the ID is incor­rect because Calflora shows its native range end­ing to the north, in Los Ange­les County.

Here’s a closer look at the foliage. Later in the year it has tiny white flow­ers with an insanely pow­er­ful fragrance–gardenias on steroids, maybe. Feel free to send me any ideas for this plant’s iden­tity. It’s prob­a­bly wish­ful think­ing on my part think­ing this is a native instead of an escapee from one of the local gardens.

[ EDIT, Jan­u­ary 24 ] Well, I knew you guys would come through! Mag­gie and Bahia have pointed me in the right direc­tion. Think­ing that it was a local native was def­i­nitely wish­ful think­ing on my part. The mys­tery shrub is a Vic­to­rian box, Pit­tospo­rum undu­la­tum. The fact that it’s escaped into at least one spot in the local canyon makes me think that this is des­tined not a long-term plant, par­tic­u­larly when you con­sider that it can get mas­sive size for a sub­ur­ban lot, not to men­tion it’s ridicu­lously close place­ment to the fenceline.

The Cal­i­for­nia Inva­sive Plant Coun­cil describes its prob­lem poten­tial this way: “Infes­ta­tions in CA are small. More prob­lem­atic on north coast.” Not the worst plant, but I could def­i­nitely do better.

The pri­vacy prob­lem could be worse. The neigh­bors spend almost no time out­doors, and much of that is in the rel­a­tive pri­vacy of dark­ened evenings.

Still, gar­dens are as much about fan­tasy as they are real­ity. It’s not that we’re doing any­thing par­tic­u­larly scan­dalous in the back yard, really. But if we were, we wouldn’t want the neigh­bors to see!

January 24 2011 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: neighbors • privacy • screening • what to do? | 18 Comments »

a hanging screen

Here’s a hang­ing screen in the gar­den, a project from a decade or more ago that I still like. It helps sep­a­rate two lev­els of the gar­den: a lower level that has black bam­boo planted in a cor­ner, and an upper one where there’s a long tiled bench and out­door fireplace.

The screen hangs in an open­ing that’s five feet high and six wide, and fea­tures opaque white poly­car­bon­ate in the frame that allows the shad­ows of the bam­boo to pro­vide inter­est­ing shad­ows on long, sunny afternoons.

The style of the screen is a lit­tle more overtly Japan­ese than where I’m in my life styl­is­ti­cally right now, and comes from a time when I was explor­ing Asian influ­enced crafts­man designs as I was try­ing to improve my wood­work­ing skills. (There’s a whole bed­room in the house that fea­tures sim­i­lar woodwork.)

The mate­ri­als are red­wood for the frame and poly­car­bon­ate for the “win­dows.” The whole assem­bly was made with no tools more spe­cial­ized than a hand-held cir­cu­lar saw and router. Every­thing is held together with screws, pegs, caulk and an unspeak­able amount of water­proof glue.

July 27 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: hardscape • screening | 9 Comments »

screening with wood, screening with plants

I showed the almost-complete ver­sion of this front porch screen ear­lier, but that was before we applied the final stain to the wood. Here it is in the really final version.

As long as we were stain­ing wood, we got up to the deck and attacked the rail­ings with the same stain. It had been more than a year since we’d done it last and things had faded. You can see the before and after pretty clearly in these pic­tures. (This project used an oil-based stain for hard­woods. They make a water-based stain that claims to last seven years, but it ended up flak­ing off this oily ipe hard­wood on the small project we tested it on. Total dis­as­ter. Save it for softwoods.)

How do all of you react to exte­rior wood that’s aged to a sil­ver color? This project is still on the new side for us and we wanted to keep it look­ing as it did when we first fin­ished it. Stain­ing all the tops and bot­toms and sides of the wood is a lot of work, though. As we get less able or moti­vated to keep up with details around the house, I’m sure we’ll let things assume more of a Gray Gar­dens look.

But back to the front screen… After the project was com­plete there was a gap between where the screen ends and the dri­ve­way. While I’m not one to put up cas­tle walls and a moat between us and the busy street, a lit­tle more pri­vacy seemed like a good idea.

Before, we had a cou­ple low laven­ders in front of the screen: Nice enough and they sur­vived with vir­tu­ally no sum­mer water­ing. But they weren’t much of a pri­vacy screen. Yank. Out they went.

In their place is this new Cean­othus ‘Tuxedo.’ I’d done a post on some gar­den cean­othus not long ago, and I couldn’t stop think­ing about the near-black foliage of this vari­ety. With the laven­ders gone, there was a per­fect place for it.

Okay, stare at the pic­ture of the lit­tle gal­lon plant and ask the obvi­ous ques­tion: “Wasn’t the idea to install a plant that would screen the view from the street?”

Cean­othus tend to be rapid grow­ers. This selec­tion is new to the trade this spring, so I’m not sure exactly how rapid it’ll be. Still, I expect that it’ll approach its tar­get size of six feet by six feet before too long. I’ll post more pic­tures as it fills in.

May 30 2009 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • my garden | Tags: ceanothus • Ceanothus Tuxedo • hardscape • screening • wood stains | 13 Comments »