Out With the Old

 Our 100 year old Lilac grove is no more. We had talked about taking it out for a couple of years now because it was an awful eyesore. The only reason we left it was that it was a big job and it had been there so long. It has been a long time since it was round and pretty.  The entire center had died out of it leaving half a dozen bare, dead branches hovering eight feet above the layer of sucker growth.

Right third of photo

Below is another picture of it in tidier days about 15 years ago. Left third of photo. It had grown all the way to that corner post but no longer put out more than a handful of blossoms.

I don’t have any pictures of its ugliness because I always positioned it as the green edge of the photo as I was looking at something more attractive.  Today, on a whim, we went in there with a lopper and saw and started trimming. I was suppose to be helping so I didn’t get too many good photos of the beginning of the process.

Not a job you would want to tackle without a backhoe.

There were a lot of roots.

For starters, I want to shrink that circle a few feet and it shouldn’t take long for the lawn to do that on its own. I have that young apple tree stuck in the flower bed as a cross pollinator that can be transplanted right into the center. I have to move that daylily back a few feet to the right, and I have a huge peony that needs to relocate and it can go right off that corner next to the boulder.

It feels so good to get that mess out of there. The edges were full of tall grass and buttercups and it was impossible to make it look nice.   For now, we will just mulch it and get used to the space available.

The only thing it did do well was block the view from the road, past the house into the backyard. But it just wasn’t worth it.

As with any big loss in a garden, it opens up an opportunity to do something better.