A comedy of errors has occurred in our yard over the last year; actually, in real-time, it has felt more like a Shakespearian tragedy, but with the passage of several months, it is now morphing into a comedy—with too many errors to be construed as true. Yet it is.
In my book Cornfields to Codfish, I wrote about The Gold Maple and what it took to care for this tree when we first planted it a few years ago. Like many of my past essays, an “And then…” sequel to this essay has emerged. The following is an account of what happened over the last year—that resulted in this weedy vista outside my kitchen and living room windows:
In the beginning, we cut down a few scrub maples to make room for the new Gold Maple. To get the Gold Maple root ball into the ground, the tree company brought out a stump grinder and ground a hole through the heavily tree-rooted area to make room for the ball. With persistent care over a couple years, the tree did well, until last year.
The Gold Maple developed scales on the leaves and the trunk and the branches. The old tree company that planted the tree went out of business, so we hired a new tree company to come out and give us a quote for removing nearby trees so the Gold Maple would get more light from the sky and more nutrients from the ground with fewer scrappy Norway maples to contend with.
My final words to the new company was NOT to desecrate my canopy that surrounds the rest of the property. I explained that these thick leafy overhangs create the privacy fence that makes me, a woman who grew up on a farm in Iowa with wide open horizons and no next-door neighbors, able to live in the city.
Come the day of the tree removal, I watched from my kitchen window as the workers fell one of the big maples and landed it on my Gold Maple. The impact of the drop ripped the biggest branches off the left side of the little tree. I ran out the door screaming. “What are you doing? The ONLY reason we are doing this project is so that this little tree will survive!!”
The trimmer was apologetic; he didn’t know this tree was anything special. A bit later, he came to my door and asked if I wanted him to trim some of the other trees. Having clearly stated in the job description that I wanted the canopy untouched, I assumed that he meant he would trim dead branches. I retreated to the house away from the noise of the saws, the blowers, and the branch grinding truck. An hour later I went out to see lollipop sticks all around the berm of the property. The canopy was scalped so that I could see into the neighbors’ windows behind and to the side of me. Leaves waved only on the upper eighth of the wooden sticks that dotted the perimeter.
I had words with the guy who gave me the quote: the one who wasn’t on site, who hadn’t conveyed the job description to the workers. My tears made him feel like shit, but they weren’t thick enough to glue branches back onto the trees. I got a bit of money back on the job: It felt like a cheap slap in the face for a wrong that couldn’t be righted.
I measured the large picture windows to hang curtains but couldn’t bring myself to close us off from the the space at the back of our property: the pre-trim view was the reason we had large picture windows installed. I bought long stems of pussy willows and put them in two vases to interrupt the view. This didn’t stop my neighbors at the back having an as-the-crow-flies view into my kitchen and living room. And I didn’t like looking at their unmown, unkept weedy backyard with junk piled next to their little shed and a two-foot high mound of fall cleanup waste piled up to the side of their yard—all of which was in plain view after the trimming incident.
Finally, instead of curtains, we had a six-foot high wooden fence installed at the top of the berm in May. We left an opening at the back corner for wildlife to cut through our yard; our property is on their route from the town forest to the state forest. The sight-line in that corner is crowded with boulders and bushes.
We went to Iowa for two weeks in July, and while we were there it rained every day in Massachusetts. We came home to healthy flower gardens adjacent to the house, albeit dotted with a few tall weeds. However, on the berm to the back and right of the drive, the shady dormant woodland of past years had blossomed into a weed purgatory one step away from the innermost circle of hell. The unstoppable rain and the newly unleashed sunshine on this previous shaded ground created a perfect storm where weeds of all shapes and sizes came forth like brazen, militant soldiers.
When the rain lessened in mid-July, the humidity grew and stayed put until the end of August. I’m pretty tough, but humidity strips me of energy. For weeks, I watched from the windows inside the air-conditioned house as the weeds became stronger, until the scene looked like a post-apocalyptic horror show to this fair-weather gardener.
Last Saturday morning, the humidity broke. Dressed in workout clothes and gloves, I took my trimmers, spade, and tall brown paper bags to the berm. Where to start? How could I make a difference? I noted tall weeds that were just starting to go to seed. I would first pull those and get them into the yard-waste bags and to the pit so they didn’t spread seed into next year. I left tall green spiky weeds that were forcing yellow flowers off their shoots. Imposters: not anything I planted but still, they were flowering. I let them live. The quack grass was thick and plastered over yards and yards of ground. There was no way I could pull it all out.
I went into the house for water and looked to the wall opposite the pussy-willow-picture-windows, and out the living room window where I saw the big boulder surrounded by weeds. If I could get that vista cleared, my soul might find a bit of peace inside looking out. Last winter, my younger son Liam found me at the kitchen sink looking out the window at the original destruction. “Mom, please stop looking out there; it only makes you sad.” He had caught me at a moment when tears could no longer be caged in the sockets. In the spring, after the installation of the wooden fence at the back, my husband Bill, together with Will and Liam, built a beautiful waterfall for me for Mother’s Day; it’s straight out from the window over the kitchen sink. The weed field starts to the immediate right of the waterfall and follows the curve of the drive. The field is probably 100 feet long by 25 feet high onto the hill.
Around the boulder, I weed-whacked the weeds right down to the ground, so low that old wood chips and rocks flew out from the weed-whacker string and stung my shins and calves on impact. This strategized trim made the immediate area around the boulder look a bit better, so I continued whacking weeds all along the flat area, stopping at the base of the berm. It was an improvement, but if I was my neighbor, I would strongly consider building a six-foot high wooden fence so I wouldn’t have to look at it.
After two days of thinning, I gave my body a bit of time to recover on Labor Day while I wondered what the hell to do next. Twenty-five years ago, I kept a spray bottle of Round Up in the garage to kill stray dandelions that popped up in our lush Midwest lawn. That poison is powerful—too powerful for mass termination of the weed field. In good conscience, I can’t spray it and then watch rain water wash it to the gutters on the street.
Labor Day evening, I researched how to kill weeds. Several websites suggested putting down thick layers of newspaper on top of the weeds then spreading four to six inches of mulch over the top of that. I’m not a big fan of mulch in my flower beds. I patiently wait for the perennial roots to get thick enough so that they drown out the weeds. However, here in this root-ridden ground, no perennials will grow, and I do not have a lead on goats to clear the land.
My best option is to smother the weeds with the news of the day and top it with a layer of decay. Better them than me.