A Game of Yards, Not Inches

Restoring the inside of an old house is all very nice, but you've got to maintain the outside, too.

We've neglected the outside yard for longer than we'd like, a failing that our neighbors have been kind enough to avoid mentioning. But over the last few months we've made a lot of progress. It's the greening of the Hart house.

This house had a lot of different landscape plants over its 120-plus years. Early on, it didn't have much at all. This photo is from around 1890, when the house was just a few years old and the first Dr. A.J. Hart still lived here (along with his two small children, pictured here on the front steps). As you can see, there's nothing much but some grass(?) and a few bushes along one side. Notice that the corner of the lot (right side of the photo) is nearly flat, with none of the terracing that would come later.

(By the way, this photo also shows the iron railing around the "widow's walk" along the roof line. We'd like to restore that one day. I also like the jaunty stripes circling the top of the "witch's cap.")

The young tree on the left looks like the beginnings of our present-day oak tree, but I don't think it's the same one. The one in this photo seems to be in the wrong place; our tree is a few feet closer to the house. It's unlikely that the tree moved itself, so this one is probably a different tree that eventually died (or was cut down) and was replaced.

This shows the house several years later -- the kids are grown now, and their dog Pedro is on the front steps  -- and the front yard has gained a few bushes. Apart from these, it's still mostly flat grass.

Fast-forward about 100 years, and the landscape has changed quite a bit. This 1970s-era image (below) shows three street plantings belonging to the city, and behind them some big, bushy trees and shrubs. There's a definite tree in the corner of the lot (right side of the photo), but it didn't last much longer. We've found its stump, but there are no other photos of the tree/shrub itself.

It's a bit hard to see in this photo, but the front yard now has its two-tiered terrace divided with bricks. Most of the grass is gone, replaced with low shrubs and flowers. And the house itself is painted almost solid white, with just a bit of dark brown trim. That would later change. It's clearly been re-roofed (probably several times), and the widow's walk is gone, as is the weather vane. Down by the sidewalk, an iron hand railing has been installed on the first set of steps. It's still here.

When we bought the house in early 2010, it had been vacant for more than two years. Before that, the owners had filled the yard with box hedges and agapanthus, neither of which we particularly liked. They're both low-maintenance (good) and green (good), but also overgrown (bad) and deer-bait (very bad). The deer love to eat the purple flowers off of the agapanthus, in particular.

Over the past five years, we've dug out all of the box hedges and most of the agapanthus. The former went all at once, in one big purge that involved a chainsaw, two shovels, and lots of swearing. The latter have been slowly reduced in number as we find time on the weekends and space in the yard-waste bin. Unfortunately, agapanthus have really big root systems that spread far and wide. Fortunately, we have very loose and sandy soil, so digging them out isn't all that hard. What you get is a big ball of thick, juicy roots, like a 10-pound clump of Chinese noodles.

Over in the backyard, things weren't much better. The restaurant used to serve customers out back, so they'd created a small brick patio to make it customer-friendly. Sadly, all that had deteriorated and was pretty ratty and rundown. The bricks were coming loose, the trees and shrubs were overgrown, and the wooden structures were falling over. This photo from move-in day shows a section of wooden fence tipping over. It was intended as a privacy screen between diners and the adjoining bed-and-breakfast inn (yellow building, left side of photo).

We eventually removed all of the bricks and reused them, one by one, to build a new patio. I think we had exactly six left over. The skinny little tree got removed entirely, and the rotting fence/screen disappeared into the back of the truck as well. The ivy growing on the back fence was running wild and pulling it down, so we cut all of that away and bolstered the fence a bit. Now we're training trumpet vines to grow on the fence in its place.

Little by little, we've dug out the old and planted the new. We've got an assortment of flowering bushes in the very front now, with some foxglove (digitalis) behind them. Alyssum fill in the small spaces. Some of the flowering bulbs that we found randomly scattered around the front yard have been left in place. We're not sure if they were planted on purpose or just found their way into the yard somehow, but we like them so we're keeping them.

Not everything has been a success. We keep looking for deer-resistant plants, but none of them really are. The young deer will eat absolutely anything. Even if they spit it out afterwards (which they often do), it still kills the plant or ruins the flowers. We've started spraying the yard with nasty-smelling deer repellent, and that seems to work. The downside is that it's, well, nasty smelling. Kind of a Pyrrhic victory.

So how does it look now? It's not finished, but we're getting there. Most of the plants are still new/young, so the front yard is looking a bit sparse, but at least everything there is there on purpose. It's the basis of the yard we want, not just what we inherited or what grew randomly when nobody was looking. And it's got some color, instead of just green leaves.