|
OUR YARD
Before 1994, lot #46 at Ocean Spray subdivision was a pie-shaped .8 acre piece of land with the wide base facing the road. It was covered with a lot of native plants, such as Oaks, Wax Myrtles, and Pines.
It is very hard to get a good overview of what it all will look like before clearing the lot. What we have now is more the result of ‘spontaneous evolution’ than intelligent design. The house arrived sometime in the summer of 1994.
CLICK HERE FOR PICTURES FROM THAT DAY
The obvious starting point was to clear enough to make room for the house and some space behind it, while leaving the rest natural. Then, as time went by, we cleared more and more, so that we now utilize most of the space, except a few yards at the far end of the pie, which comes in handy for leaving piles of yard wastes out-of-sight.
The selection of plants has also gone through several stages of evolution. Excited to find ourselves in hardiness zone 8, we first tried plants that we wouldn’t dream of trying in Raleigh. There were peach trees, peanuts, bananas and other fancy things. We also admired the Oleanders, planted along the main road on Emerald Isle, so we bought a few of them, but they never did very well on our side of the bridge.
Right from the beginning, we planted Wax Myrtles along our lot lines. They grow wild here and that may have been part of the attraction, since we had used them as screen plants in Raleigh and paid over $10 per plant back in the 1980‘s. It is really a very good plant, but do they ever grow fast??
A guy who cleared the lot next to ours and threw a few Myrtles over to us, once asked if we have a lot of mosquitoes in our yard. I told him that we really don’t, but periodically we have aggressive horseflies and other unpleasant critters. He told me that Wax Myrtles are supposed to repel mosquitoes. I don’t know if that is an old wife’s tale, but the fact is that we don’t have many of them.
We sobered up from our initial ‘fancy plants phase’ and started using more sensible choices of flowers and shrubs. If you click HERE, you will enter a gallery of pictures of plants we have been using over the years.
For 2006 we have a new section, called YARDENING IN 2006 With the help of our digital camera we will record in words and pictures when new signs of spring, summer, etc. show up. It is a dynamic record of the changing view of our yard.
Our yard really has three separate sections. The front yard, the area between the road and the house is the one that passers-by see, and it is the area where we spend many afternoons enjoying our ‘happy hour’, watching the birds. The ‘bird section’ of this web site describes what is going on there with the birds, and fortunately we live almost at the end of our road, so there is very little traffic to disturb us.
When it comes to plants at the front yard, we have gradually arrived at a situation where we have a few shrubs and perennials, but where containers and hanging baskets provide the variation in color and placement. And, of course, we don’t have a lawn.
The second section of the yard is basically a patio area, dominated by the WONDERFUL POOL, and completely private, thanks to buildings, Pittosporums and Leyland Cypresses. You can best think of that section of the yard as an outdoor room.
The deep back yard has more and more turned into a park with no - or low - maintenance shrubs, such as Crepe Myrtles, Dogwoods, Japanese maples, Azaleas, and Wax Myrtles. This is a beautiful, quiet area to sit and relax, enjoying the birds on spring and fall mornings, especially. Remember, Noel Coward said that only “mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.”
Well, as was mentioned earlier, we don’t have a lawn. This departure from a Southern tradition makes so much sense to us that you’ll find a complete page devoted to
THE CASE FOR NO GRASS
You have probably found that you click on the underlined words on this page to go to those other pages and use the ‘BACK’ label on your browser to come back to this page....
|