A Hardscape in the Making

Today we talked to a resident of Hillmont Avenue who has been slowly constructing a hardscape in her front yard with her bare hands. Her hands show all her hard work. Her clothes are as old as the ages and show all the materials she has ever worked with. She has a husky who barks constantly at my dog as we pass by from behind a gate. This woman has intimate knowledge of different kinds of landscape cloth, how large loose rocks need to be so your blower won't blow them around when you are cleaning off the leafy debris, how to pour a concrete path using special forms so your path will resemble flagstone (without the cost), the costs of coloring concrete (one product is cheap, one not). She cut off a piece of landscape cloth to give me. It is gray, the better to blend in with rock, and apparently does not let in runners, which are the bane of my existence. I had black landscape cloth and gold rock on my sidewalk strip but it has all been taken over entirely by the crabgrass. This woman's plantings will consist mostly of birds of paradise. Since they have been successful (and have been there longer than she), that's what she will plant. The secret is to dig a hole at least two times as wide and one and a half deep. In Roxanne's opinion, they are messy, but I love to cut them and in my old house, I would arrange them in a black vase purchased especially to show them off.