Don’t wait until May to contact a landscaper!

If you have arrived at the stage where you are ready to hire a landscaper, start calling now. Too often, homeowners wait until spring (or midsummer), only to discover that by April, good landscapers are booked for the season, and even the hacks won’t be able to get to your project until fall.

And this is the way the industry is in the north. For readers in USDA Zones 6 – 10, the landscaping season never really stops. I have a friend who is a wonderful landscape designer in Portland, Oregon (hi, Debbie) and I always forget when I e-mail her in February about something dumb that here I am sleeping in until noon, sitting around in my underwear playing video games, while she’s working weekends trying to get designs and bids together for some Monday morning client meeting.

So regardless of what state you are in, start the process of landscaper selection in February, if you want to get anything accomplished in ’07. I’m already booked into the start of June, and that’s just stuff left over from last year. Get out to the home and garden shows this month and next and talk turkey to landscapers you find there, contact your state nursery & landscape association for lists of members in your area, and start setting appointments.

Don’t buy a house without gutters.

It happens more and more each day. Hip, puerile, egotistical architects exhibiting the kind of ignorance that comes only from too much formal education believe that they’re the next I.M. Pei, and design houses without gutters. Gutters, you see, destroy the look and lines of their immaculate residential manifestations.

Far too many building architects have no concept of, or appreciation for, landscaping. (The same also can be said of a percentage of landscape architects, but don’t get me started.) I’ve landscaped houses without gutters, and it’s infuriating. I would like to introduce all designers of houses to an important concept: rain.

Rain falls on roofs, and without gutters, creates a drip line that rings the house. A drip gully is more like it, for the power of water dropping to the ground in sheets during a heavy storm washes away mulch and decimates shrubs. In some cases I have witnessed, water from roofs without gutters has washed away perennials, and removed nearly all the soil around trees and shrubs.

You also get flooded basements, and in various portions of surrounding yards, great pools of water, prized by mallards in spring. Never build a house based on a design that lacks gutters. If you buy a house without gutters, you will have them added within three years. Ben, a young man on my landscaping crew last summer who had spent the previous summer working for a gutter installation company, says two.

Please don’t include photo attachments when you e-mail the
Renegade Gardener.

Oh how I wish these were simpler times. I wish I could take the time to review photos of your gardens and bare spaces and new homes aching for landscaping, and respond to your requests for design suggestions via e-mail. But please, questions only, and no more than two per e-mail. Attachments included with e-mails are never opened. That’s because I don’t have time to look at your photos, not a case of being concerned about viruses.

I never worry about viruses. I’m a Mac guy—can’t you tell?

Don’t freak out in fall when your evergreens develop orange needles that drop off.

It’s that time of year when people e-mail me, concerned because some of the needles on their pine trees are turning orange and dropping off. Perfectly normal, and nothing to worry about. Upon closer inspection, you’ll see that these needles are interior needles. Pine, spruce, arborvitae, fir, hemlock, cypress, sequoia, about every evergreen I can think of drop needles from previous years in the fall. Due to their large needles and more open habit, pines are among the most noticeable. It’s a fine and natural thing. If they didn’t, you wouldn’t have that beautiful orange carpet of needles gracing the area around them.

Don’t buy a Zone 6 fountain for a Zone 4 yard.

It’s a fairly common mistake, you finally go out and buy a fountain for your yard, then discover that the thing needs to be tarped for winter because it can’t handle freeze-thaw cycles. I wish garden centers and nurseries would take the same care in selecting the garden accessories they sell as they do their plants. Plants aren’t the only things that need to be hardy for your zone.

The thing to remember when buying and placing a fountain is that it is intended to be a twelve-month garden feature. So what if you have to drain it and pull the pump for winter, it’s still a sculpture, it should still look great in winter, particularly after a snowfall. 

This unfortunate scene is not far from my home. I think it’s concrete, and whereas some concrete fountains can be drained and then left alone for northern winters, cheaper ones can’t. Surprisingly, certain types of plastic fountains also need winter protection in Zones 3-5, although if you buy a plastic fountain, well, you had it coming. Two words when it comes to selecting a fountain: iron and stone. If you can’t afford an iron or stone fountain, save up until you can.

Somewhere in the Midwest is a home with a blue-tarped RV in the driveway and a blue-tarped fountain in the yard. I’m sure some day I’ll get that picture.