Yard Cleanup

This isn't going to be one of those 'happy happy' posts about everything blooming. It's about yard work.

It's so satisfying to cut off big, big, I mean BIG branches, and pull up 3 foot high weeds. Who knew that all those English roses that I didn't prune in January are actually climbers? Took a deep breath and cut a 5-foot long, half inch diameter cane from the Eglantyne rose (pink flower in the picture, very vigorous and fragrant!). That leaves another 6 feet of that cane. The Salet (dark red rose in picture) is being interwined by pink jasmine (jasminum polyanthum) which was what I wanted, but the star jasmine in front has grabbed branches and is throttling them! It took some patience to cut the rose free.

Then there are the mistakes from my ignorant gardener days. I didn't know that the Japanese Anemone Queen Charlotte is invasive! In addition to springing up everywhere, the spent blooms dry on long, ugly brown stalks and must be pulled out by hand. Maybe defoliant will eradicate it without hurting the tender air roots of the camellia that it's near? Speaking of invasive, I sneered at the asparagus fern ibeing sold for money. How do I get rid of the ones progressing across my yard? They have their own underground nutrition nodes so they're hard to kill.

Alas, there's that oramental tree in the center of the yard whose roots sprout branches. It has infiltrated a hedge (hard to saw off saplings that are inside the hedge), lifted a stepping stone on the main path, and appears among the ground cover. Is it possible that one small tree can propagate a whole forest of itself?