A Vision and its Outcome

HomoDomi has these visions of the way things could be -- for instance, he thought he could imagine a day when the back garden was not edged by the neighbors' decrepit ugly green garage on one side, and, behind a chain link fence, a compost heap, which stinks in high summer. (Composting is a great ideal, but for small lots in urban areas, the realities can be unpleasant.) So he built a pergola, of sorts (strictly speaking, a pergola would have a "roof", too) -- fencing for vines to grow up over and mask the ugly walls put up by our neighbors.

I cannot find any photos of the truly Before, when the whole northeast corner of the yard was literally a heap of yard waste on bare weed-strewn dirt, half hidden behind a huge old rhododendron. We cleared out the yard waste, and I pruned the rhodie into a more tree-like form, in 2006. In May 2007, HomoDomi installed a brick patio and the twining fence.

Here is the corner as it looked about a month later, with a new brick patio and planted with jasmine, honeysuckle, clematis, mandavilla and passion flower, two plants at the base of each column. We wanted evergreen vines, with all scented flowers, which would bloom at different times of the summer, to mask the compost smell. It turns out only the clematis is truly evergreen, and the passion flower has no scent.

Here is the corner as it looks this morning (above and below, yesterday afternoon). We moved the rhododendron to the front of the house in July (exactly the wrong time of year to transplant a rhodie, I was told later by someone at the nursery, but it's doing fine), and carefully added rich soil and grass to the resultant hole and the dead patch around it. Now we have a large stretch of luxuriant lawn, where not long ago it was broken up by bushes (we moved a rhubarb, too). The globes are solar-lights, which glow nicely for a few hours after sunset, and we have a firepit, which is perfect for making s'mores on a cool night.


Next summer we are going to extend the fence another 10-12 feet, obscuring the neighbor's driveway in addition to the garage. But for now, the original vision has led to a comfortable improvement.