Starting September in a Random Sort of Way

September is here ... summer is waning, and fall is on the horizon. 

A beautiful sunset, photographed one evening last week.

The past few mornings have been cool and crisp, perfect for a quick walk-around and great for working outside, and daytime temperatures have been in the low-to-mid 80s.  There is a lot of work to do, and The Husband and I are taking it one day at a time.  When the ground conditions are favorable, we pull weeds ... and this job is coming along quite nicely.  About 2/3 of the rose field is passable.

My figs have been ripening for a couple of weeks now.  There are eight varieties of figs planted beside the barn, as I experiment with which variety I like the most.  Wouldn't you know that the one that's growing and producing the best has lost its label, so I have no idea what it is.  Figs are easy to propagate, however, and I will just make some more of them from this bush.  The new babies should be ready to plant in the spring.

Shoo, fly!

As I mentioned yesterday, I went to the nursery to pick up our boxwood bushes for the front of the house.  As they were being dug and lifted by the nursery workers, I had a brief moment of panic ... these bushes are BIG and HEAVY.  Planting all eight of them in one day didn't seem to be possible, and the ones we didn't get planted could dry out and get stressed.  So, I picked up four of the bushes, leaving the other four in the care of the nursery for a few more days.  It turned out to be a great decision.

There is no way we could have handled these bushes without the tractor.

The Husband was finishing up the final hole, while I took a much-needed water break.

This photo was taken this morning.  As large as these bushes are (3 full feet tall), they still have a bit of growing to do before they're in proportion to the house.

Our friends Jim and Dan came to visit a couple of weeks ago.  We had lunch in the pavilion on a beautiful afternoon, and we sat and visited the rest of the day away.  While we were chatting, Dan snapped this photo of me.  He sent it to me yesterday.

The subject of Dan's email with the photo attached was "A Beautiful Woman".  The photo surprised me a bit, but I'm liking it more and more.  This is not the face that I see in the mirror ... it is a face that has character.  I guess I didn't realize that there was THAT much character.  It sorta crept up on me.  I see both of my grandmothers in this face.

Sunday evening, after Hurricane Irene had moved from Virginia to do her damage in New England, we had the most beautiful sunset.

I darkened this photo in Photoshop so the colors would pop.

The whole time we were planting the boxwoods yesterday, The Husband and I were firing quotes from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" at each other.

Bring me a shrubbery!

(Like I said in the title of this post ... it's pretty random around here.)

The Moat in the Front of Our House

Thank you, thank you for all of the lovely comments on my Photoshop 'look into the future' of the front of our house.  I am pretty pleased with the way my plan should look when I get finished.  (IF I get finished)

A few of you mentioned growing roses on the porch, or modifying the design by doing something closer to the house, and I realized that I should do a post to clarify the unusual  layout of the front of our house.  From the driveway, the place looks like any other house where the grade goes straight to the house ... but take a few steps toward the porch, and the situation becomes more apparent.

We have stairs on each side of our porch that lead to the area that we call 'The Moat".

The retaining wall you see here was probably built by the family who remodeled our house in the 1930s or 40s.  The grade of the land was changed significantly at that time, and it allows access to underneath the front porch ... you can walk straight under the porch from one side of the house to the other.  Sometimes, we call the porch "The Drawbridge".

When we bought the house, The Moat was mostly a swamp.  Rainwater tended to run toward the house and end up in the moat, not a good situation for a house with a basement.  To remedy the situation, we dug a trench, installed drain tile and a surface drain, added a second drain line to carry the water from the downspouts, raised the grade on the south side of our house, and now our basement is significantly drier.  The timbers you see between the house and the wall show how much we raised the grade on this side of the house to correct the drainage.

Our house originally had a typical English basement.  I have doctored this photo of the north corner of the house to show you where the original grade line was before the moat was installed so long ago.    These smaller windows are in our laundry room, and they are the only basement windows that are still their original size.  (When the moat was built, the openings for the other windows in the basement were enlarged.)

Now that you can (hopefully) see the challenges of our front yard, I think you can clearly understand the difficulties we have had to overcome in designing the landscaping for the front of our house.  Though I would LOVE to put a climbing rose on the porch (White Cap would be PERFECT!), there's no soil anywhere near the porch to plant it in.

In this photo, I have outlined the retaining wall in red.  See how these windows are significantly longer than the originals on the other side of the house? 

Here is the view of the planter and retaining wall, looking from the left side of the above photo toward the porch.  It shows the stepped-down far end of the planter and brick wall that is the side of our brick stairs on the front porch. 

Imagine boxwoods planted in that long, empty space.

What's planted in that bed lined with cobblestones that you see in the photo above, you ask?  Roses, of course!  Next year, when the roses have a bit more size, they will be trained to wire on the wall of the house.

The roses are:  1. Reve d'Or,  2. Marechal Niel,  3.  Perle d'Or,  4. Alister Stella Gray.  This bed also has clumps of heirloom iris and a row of peonies dug long ago from The Husband's grandfather's garden.  These peonies have moved with us FOUR times ... who says you can't move peonies?

So, the plan is set.  This morning, the ground is dry enough to dig, and I plan to be outside (as soon as I have a good breakfast) digging holes for our new boxwood bushes.  Once the boxwoods are planted, it will be time to address the blank grassy area between the planters and the driveway.  We already have a beautiful stone walkway ... but it needs SOMETHING ... put on your thinking caps and see if there's anything that you can suggest.

This is a stitched photo showing both sides of the front walkway. 

 

It's a beautiful day for digging some holes!!

Fiddling with Photoshop ... the Front of Our House

There were no cars parked in front of our house yesterday morning when I went out to check for hurricane damage.  (One of The Husband's things on his storm preparation list was to move our cars away from potential falling limbs, because we have large trees in our front yard.)  With no cars in the way, and the sun shining, I took the opportunity to get a really good, straight ahead photo of the front of our house ... then I came in and went to work with Photoshop to visualize my plans to improve our curb appeal.

This is the photo I took, showing the unedited truth of what our house looks like when we pull in the driveway.  It looks good ... but a bit bare.

Here is the imaginary 'after' photo ... showing boxwood bushes, my design for gingerbread for the front porch, and the new color of the front door.  (Highlighted words are links to previous posts)

It's a lot better, isn't it? 

As soon as the ground dries out enough for me to dig the holes for the new bushes, I will go to the nursery and pick them up  (The bushes are already paid for.  I tagged them and left them at the nursery until we were ready to plant them.)

It's going to take a while to make the actual house look like my rendering.  This has been quite a process ... and it's wonderful to finally see the results ... even if it only exists in Photoshop right now.

Landscaping Decisions

The landscaping on the front of our house seems to have been a problem for most owners of our house.  In collecting photos, I found that it seems to run in a 20-30 year cycle.  There will be a photo with nicely manicured shrubs, followed years later by the same shrubs overgrown and dwarfing their allotted area, followed by a photo with nothing in front of the house.  (You can see some of this cycle in THIS POST, which follows the evolution of our house through photos.)

Currently, we are in the 'nothing' phase.  Our house is very symmetrical, and this is the one area of our property where I feel I should stick with a traditional landscaping plan.  The grade in our front yard drops off about three feet toward each side of the house, further complicating landscaping decisions.  We had brick and stone planters built in 2007 to help visually level the area and to keep whatever we plant in better scale with the facade of the house.

This part of the property is the only area where I feel the need to conform to a more conventional design.  To me, old houses need boxwood and that's what I had my heart set on.  After researching various types of boxwood, from traditional English boxwood, to American boxwood, to some of the more modern cultivars ... and I settled on Green Mountain boxwood.  It resembles American box, without the perskickety nature.  It is tolerant of a wide variety of conditions and is resistant to many of the boxwood pests.

I loaded Daniel up yesterday, and he and I headed to Roxbury Mills nursery in downtown Fredericksburg to buy our bushes.  They had eight beautiful ones in stock, and eight is exactly what we need, and I didn't want to let them slip away.  We paid for them, and put SOLD tags on them, and I will pick them up in a few weeks once the hot summer weather is behind us and planting conditions moderate a bit.  (The pots in the front of the house in the first photo are there to try out spacing to decide where the bushes should be planted.)

This is one more step toward making the front of our house a feature, instead of a work-in-progress.  It's about time.