The Story
There’s a lovely chill in the air this morning. Feels like fall. It’s Monday. I had a good weekend. Music every day. This morning I go in for routine bloodwork, then it will be back to the yard. I have a big pile of mulch to move from spot A to spot B. When it’s moved, I’ll have completed the installation of a new flower bed along the north fence. I hope it will help the little chinquapin oak it surrounds. That’s the plan.
It certainly helped the big oaks after the disastrous pruning of 2010. There’s something about cleaning up the ground around the foot of a tree and installing understory plants that does good things for them. I think I’ll put in some blackfoot daisies. We haven’t had any in a while and I miss them. And maybe some slavia greggi which tend to thrive in our soil. There are lots of choices. Some things will just come on their own, like lantana.
Ultimately, as the trees grow and spread our lawn will disappear and we’ll just have trees and plants with paths to move among them. That sounds like a nice plan. It will certainly be less to mow. It’s amazing how much that has already happened in the 13 years since we first moved in and planted our trees and first plants. And not just with our trees and plants, but that’s a story for another day, or maybe that’s just the story. Things change. And they have.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver's Tale