Hell-Strip

“The Magic Carpet”

ESPatch May 3, 2017 3 comments

I encourage you to switch this video to full screen – it is visually stunning cinematography featuring Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh.

We are all big fans of Bollywood movies in the Patch.

In fact, keeping with the tradition and success of the Ancient Mariner series that I ran some years back (haha), I will share some of our favorite songs with you over the next series of posts.

That should take us well into 2020 based on the sporadicity of my recent postings and how many Bollywood songs we like!

Painting By Viktor Vasnetsov

Of course the magic carpet I am referring to in the title of this post is significantly less exotic and it certainly cannot fly of its own accord, (unless thrown in a wayward manner by a shovel).

It has nothing to do with King Solomon, teleportation or India.

I am of course referring to rather large quantities (in my case 30 yards to be exact) of decomposed granite.

Delivered in rather large trucks.

To think I used to buy this aggregate in small bags from Home Depot.

Ah, those were the days.

“Watch out for the cables…watch out for the cables!”

“Back wheels coming off the ground!”

A few days later the DG carpet was laid,

and some colorful furniture had moved in.

My buying decision when it comes down to purchasing garden furniture is sadly based solely around excrement.

Due to the location of our family backyard hangout, under this large Post Oak,

there is an abundance of the nasty stuff – ah the price you pay for shade.

This generally negates purchasing anything too expensive with say a nice deep wood-grain or refined finish, because well, it will be literally be covered before you can say: “that’s a really nice garden chair, where did you purcha…oh dear, I am afraid that dove has just jettisoned an alien all over it.”

“Ash…we have a problem.”

No, for me it is about the greasiness of the releasing agents in the plastic of the furniture – the texture on the plastic – how easy will it be to blast and dislodge a particularly stubborn ‘King Richard the 3rd’ with a hose?

Another carpet was also laid in the front yard, this time in the form of Tejas Black gravel:

I got so tired of this manhole cover getting covered I finally did something about it.

“Aye, he’s gaan naiwhere!”

Tejas Black generates some great shadows and looks even better when wet.

Also with a few introduced berms it tends not to look so contemporary, a thick layer discourages weeds.

I like to plant plants that can be pruned up / trunking specimens, that way if weeds do blow in…and they will, they are very visible and can be easily and cleanly treated.

Moving along…

We had a surprise this morning before school.

Upon exiting the back door there was clawing and a few snorts coming from this mountain laurel.

A pair of young raccoons were trying desperately to get some sleep.

They stayed on top of the mountain laurel until the sun came over the top of the house, forcing them to move on

…just stay out of my attic, ok?

To finish…

I am always shocked after revisiting an install as to how much time must have elapsed for things to have grown to the size they are.

It just never seems that long for me.

Here is where this north Austin installation started:

I remember it as if it were a couple maybe three years ago – not 5…

…hoping these baby cypresses would make it, they seemed so distant from each other as saplings.

A new water feature. The fresh plantings were so small – you can barely see the vitex tree (in the lawn in front of the shed door).

Then with a little help from time and some solid pruning by the client on the vitex, the scene had transformed:

The space felt very peaceful, the cypresses were now rubbing shoulders with one another and most surprising to me – it did not feel like Austin.

Visually it looks and feels like it could be in a cooler climate, somewhere much further north…

of course it was a cool rainy day when I visited.

I love the new suburban ‘cabin in the woods’ look to the garden shed.

Stay Tuned For:

“The Perfect Specimen“

All material © 2017 for eastsidepatch. Unauthorized
intergalactic reproduction strictly prohibited, and
punishable by late (and extremely unpleasant)
14th century planet Earth techniques.

“Seeds & Weeds”

ESPatch Apr 11, 2016 0 comments

Aw come on!

I think I can safely say I have had a few stray seeds blow in to this area of late…one has been especially prolific this year:

Wild carrots!

What I did not know until writing this post was that wild carrots

Daucus carota

are actually baby Queen Anne’s Lace plants, and the carrot / taproot is completely edible.

A word of warning though, Queen Anne’s Lace has a rather lethal doppelganger…poison hemlock, which if mistakenly ingested causes this to happen:

followed by immediate death.

How do you tell them apart?

Poison Hemlock

Conium maculatum

has purple or black spots on a smooth stem whereas Queen Anne’s Lace has a hairy, completely green stem.

In ancient Greece, hemlock was used to poison condemned prisoners.

He drank the contents as though it were a draught of wine.

The most famous victim of hemlock poisoning is the philosopher Socrates. After being condemned to death for impiety and corrupting the young men of Athens, in 399 BC, Socrates was given a potent infusion of the hemlock plant.

This account is only slightly disturbing! :

Coles’ Art of Simpling: ‘If Asses chance to feed much upon Hemlock, they will fall so fast asleep that they will seeme to be dead, in so much that some thinking them to be dead indeed have flayed off their skins, yet after the Hemlock had done operating they have stirred and wakened out of their sleep, to the griefe and amazement of the owners.’

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Talking of feeding upon things,

when the loquats fruit like they have this year, it is a sweet bounty for all manner of creatures.

Squirrels, birds, insects…

we even jumped into the fray with a time consuming loquat cobbler.

“Cobbler?”

This NERIUM oleander ‘Hardy Red’ has been blooming for weeks now.

It has grown so large with the rains that it is receiving a regular pruning to keep it from totally obscuring the sidewalk. I recently witnessed a pedestrian performing a sideways limbo to get past it from my living room window.

Right in front of the oleander I noticed this opportunist growing out of a crack in the concrete.

Staying in the front of the Patch,

bamboo muhly and soft leaf yucca make great companions.

Later in the day our front door burst open with a force that brought back odd memories, http://www.eastsidepatch.com/2009/09/dude-wheres-my-car/

“Dad, Dad quick, you need to see this!

Swinging around the front of the house he pointed skyward.

A very large Great horned owl complete with glowing orange eyes and a storybook hoot.

I managed to get a couple of shaky shots in before a panicking pair of mocking birds, no doubt with a nest close by, started screaming and dive bombing the owl. It slowly turned and with a few beats of its wings it was gone.

Talking of wings.

I assume this Giant Leopard Moth (with not so giant wings) is in the process of metamorphosis?

Finally:

I will leave with a recent design and installation I have completed.

This one had a significant slope to deal with and overall it felt a little claustrophobic due to narrow pathways and funneling gates. There were also some significant clumps of Nandina that were first on my list for termination,

followed quickly by the existing fence.

The front lacked order and getting from the front door to the side door needed definition.

Here are a couple of visuals I used to communicate the broad strokes of the design:

A ga-ga pit was introduced by the client becoming a main feature of the scheme.

Ga-ga is believed to have been brought to the United States by Israeli counselors working at Jewish summer camps. It was played as early as the mid-1960s. Children often learn about ga-ga through summer camps across Canada and the United States, with varying sizes and shapes of pits…let the work commence!

Determining position and scale…framing begins and area is prepped.

The final pit surrounded by Oklahoma flagstone and varying sizes of river rock.

The front steps were taken out and replaced with a wider solution.

Where the red chairs are I introduced a small gallery deck for the ga-ga pit – visually tying the two structures together and expanding the front porch.

On the right side the driveway was widened and a new limestone dry-stack retaining wall constructed.

Stay Tuned For:

“The Mona Leveridge”

Mona_Leveridge All material © 2016 for eastsidepatch. Unauthorized
intergalactic reproduction strictly prohibited, and
punishable by late (and extremely unpleasant)
14th century planet Earth techniques.

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