On milkweed, trees, and grass

Now we head over to the very back corner of our yard, for a look at the last several years of work we've put in back there. It is a shaded and overgrown mess, full of invasive species and poison ivy, so it's not one where we really enjoy working. And it's not visible to anyone but us, so the need to keep it up to avoid embarrassing ourselves is also not a compelling motivation. But still, we're making progress bit by bit.

Step one, back in 2021, was to to sever and remove as much of the wisteria and ivy choking the trees that we could. Wisteria seems impossible to fully eradicate (at least without herbicides), so it keeps on growing up out of the ground. But at least now, it no longer strangles the trees. Removing it required cutting it from its roots and then pulling it off the tree, creating long fibrous vines that were strong enough to swing from!

After learning that this honeysuckle (exact name escapes me) was actually invasive, we pulled that out too. D had wanted to for some time, but I enjoyed the smell. Still, once we learned that it wasn't particularly beneficial to local pollinators, I was glad to be rid of it. 

With the honeysuckle "tree" gone and more weeding on the ground, we ended up with a lot of space to work with. And since the line where the lawn stopped and the "garden" (I use the word very loosely) began always felt like it was right where I needed to stand to push the kids on the swings, we regained some lawn by pushing the railway tie dividers back about 2 feet.

We spread some compost and grass seed and did pretty good with adding more space, as you'll see in the pictures that follow where you can't even really tell there used to be a different border:

So here we are, with a nice cleared place that was much narrower (meaning, we felt, greater likelihood of success for us keeping it looking nice):

When the crew was out doing the patio and the corner not-quite-a-rain garden, we had them put in a birch tree on this side as well:

Well, spoiler alert--it died pretty spectacularly. We tried to complain and have it replaced but never got any satisfaction from the landscaper. We were pretty bummed and also wondered if maybe the spot was bad, though it is usually damp and shady and seemed perfect for a river birch. Then, to jump forward to just last week while we were doing other work in this garden bed, we found this underground, where the birch had been:

This large metal basket, filled with rocks and the tinest bit of soil, was obviously not removed from under the tree when the birch was planned! Of course it died--there was nowhere for its roots to go! They must have been trapped in this small space until they just gave up. SIGH. Ok. Well we just lit that money on fire.

Fortunately, the rest of the back garden bed is doing much better. We planted a slew of different kinds of milkweed: butterfly weed, common milkweed, and swamp milkweed, all native pollinators that monarchs supposedly love (I say supposedly because while they joined us two years ago in our front garden bed, no monarch caterpillars have made a home of this back area. I wonder if it has something to do with the slightly-more-than-dappled shade in this back bed (milkweed prefers sun, but they're surviving admirably back here). Here are some of the milkweed when we planted it in fall of 2021, with the newest arrivals from the nursery circled in red:

And here it is as of last week:

The orange butterfly weed has already flowered but the pink swamp milkweeds are starting to put out buds too. You can see from this angle that we still have a lot of ground we'd like to cover:

Here's what the pink milkweeds will look like, as captured last year:

Also in this back garden bed are a few trees, because I can't help myself. Close to the shed, we planted a sycamore, one of my favorite kinds of trees. We planted in 2021 and here's how tall it was last summer:

From this angle, see it all the way over there on the right?

There's not much for scale, but I'd guess it was maybe about 5 to 6 feet. Fast forward to this year and you can see it's already taller than the shed!

It's quite close to an oak tree, but we had a few arborists suggest that oak tree isn't going to last much longer, so I don't think they will have to compete for long:

We also planted a pair of "stellar" pink dogwoods for some understory color, at the same time as the sycamore:

Sadly, in keeping with our recent 50/50 odds, one of the trees is doing just fine (the one on the left) and the other kicked the bucket. Oh well. I failed to get a picture of it in flower. The best picture I have is one I took to document what kind of tree it was once I realized the band was too tight and had to come off:

More plans for this section include adding more milkweed into the cleared area, possibly planting borage seeds among the milkweed for more ground cover, and keeping the area as clear as we can from weeds and wisteria. We have separate plans for the small section of our garden further to the left (looking at the garden/away from the house), but that's a post for another time.