Plants vs. Turleys

We've never been much for gardening. We've never had the time. So the neighbor's vegetation has, by default, become ours as well. And the neighbors are big on ivy. Very, very big fans of ivy. I've got nothing against ivy, but we'd always imagined something different for our yard.

Starting about six months ago, Kathy began the task of removing some of said ivy from the back fence. To be honest, we didn't know we had a back fence. Turns out it's about 8 feet high, painted white, and runs the whole length of the lot line, but it was so completely covered in ivy it was invisible. It took Kathy several weeks (and several more garbage cans) to uncover it all.

I think of ivy as a thin, spindly little vine, but this stuff had trunks. They were thick and stout and hard to chop down. When the hand trimmer failed we got the tree saw. When that failed, we swung an axe at it. And when that failed, I got out my angle grinder and ground its little fibrous legs off. It made a funny smell but by golly we killed the thing. "Take that! And stay down!"

Kathy is becoming the Rambo of the lower phyla. Have trimmers, will eradicate with extreme prejudice. Plants fear her.

Having denuded the back fence -- which promptly fell over, having lost all its biological support -- she turned her attention to the side yard. Again, we didn't know anything about a "fence," per se, just another wall of ivy separating us from the house next door. This time the ivy was only about waist high, so we could chop it back without resorting to power tools. As before, removing the ivy revealed a white fence we didn't know we had, although this one was a cute white lattice design. It must have been nice, oh, 40 years ago before the jungle absorbed it. Now it's rotten and unable to support itself. I've driven a few rusty lengths of rebar into the ground to hold it up.

See this four-foot stump here? We didn't know that was there. It was completely obscured by all the ivy, too. In fact, we found a total of three old stumps that had been lurking in our yard, unseen by mortals all these years.

Our plan -- and we do have one -- is to replace all the ivy with flowers or flowering plants. Right now, the whole yard is green, as in no color. It's healthy and all (or it was before we killed it), but also kind of boring. We'd like a bit more color and the first step before planting was to remove the invasive ivy to make room. Naturally, this all comes just a few weeks before the Historic Homes Tour, so we may have to apologize to our visitors for the condition of the yard. Maybe it'll be dark that day.