Why I Oughta...

A couple of weeks ago, I posted photos of one of our Earth Day 2020 trees (a Chanticleer Flowering Pear) that we planted in the side yard as a screening tree for our Screened Porch .  That was our 36th tree planted in the yard, this post is about the 37th tree:  a Lombardy Poplar. This was an inexpensive tree that I bought at an online nursery that is about six feet tall from the soil, but very thin - caliper-wise.  I didn't measure it when I planted it, but I'll do a new-tree roundup for calipers later this Summer.  It was a bareroot tree based on the root structure. We planted this one all the way in the back - where I've been putting the wood chips - and it is located just to the north of where I planted the Corkscrew Willow three years ago .  That tree died, but you can still see the trunk of it on the left side of the photo at the top.    When I dug up the hole for this tree, I seem to have left some of the soil/loam on top of the chips that I'll have to re-

Back in February, I posted about a tree that I came across that had a lot of the features that I desired in a tree: the Diana Weeping Japanese Larch .  It is a narrow tree (columnar), is contorted, has a weeping habit and is a deciduous conifer.  I have yet to see a  Diana Weeping Larch, but I did come across a similar tree from an online nursery named Kigi Nursery called: The Horstmann's Recurved Contorted Larch Tree . I read the description and thought this was a good fit for our yard: LARIX DECIDUA 'HORSTMANN'S RECURVED' CONTORTED LARCH IS AN UPRIGHT DECIDUOUS CONIFER WITH TWISTING, TURNING BRANCHLETS. NEEDLES ARE GREEN IN SUMMER AND GOLDEN IN AUTUMN BEFORE FALLING. PREFERS ORGANIC RICH WELL DRAINED SOIL. Sounds perfect, right?  I went on the site and they were offering only a 0-1 year old tree for $40 .  I don't know what I thought it was going to look like when it arrived, but when I opened the package, I felt surprised.  Here's a look at the tree

My 2020 to-do list for the yard included this item in #8:  "Find cheap fruit trees (that include pollinators) and plant a Belgian Fence (somewhere)."  Welp, I found eight apple trees at the same Home Depot tree sale last week and brought them home to start a Belgian Fence.  Here's a look at some of them below. I have documented the Belgian Fences that we came across in Disneyland over the years.  Here's the first one that caught my attention on a trip .  And here's another from a different trip . I ended up picking apple trees for this because they had the right amount of them and had a variety that I was most keen to get:  Honeycrisp.  One of the things that I've picked up while researching the Belgian Fence was to learn that it is best to select two varieties of apple trees that are 'pollinators'.  In a look at the list for Honeycrisp apples , one of the selected pollinators is Yellow/Golden Delicious.  They are cross-pollinators

When I see a good deal on trees, I suppose I just figure our yard can handle a few more.  And that's how we ended up with a new tree in our garage that I'll plant in the next week or so.  It is a London Plane Tree 'Bloodgood'.  Tag below.  Why'd I buy it?  It is a good-sized tree at a good price and it reminds me of Paris.  Paris?!  Yeah...Paris.  Not London.  Where they're from, of course. Why Paris?  They remind me of our time in Paris because of the stand of them in a section of Luxembourg Gardens that had vines tied between them.    Here's my post about them .   I've posted a lot about Luxembourg Gardens since our visit as the experience has stuck with me - from the chairs to the boxes to the trees to the edging to the mulch .  This post is going into that tag .   Due to social distancing, we didn't see any family for my birthday this year and a result of that was that Nat's Grampy who lives in Oak Lawn sent me a birthday card with

We have three young trees that were all bought as nursery stock that haven't broken dormancy in our yard.  On a walk around the yard yesterday, I was surprised by the small Chanticleer Pear tree that had not joined the other ones in flowering out.  Below, you can see that tree for garden diary reference.   Here's one of the buds on the tips of the tree.  I've scraped away some of the bark and I see plenty of green underneath it, so maybe this one is just late in waking up? On the other hand, why isn't it showing even ONE flower?  The tree across the yard is in full bloom.  That has me concerned. The Crimson King Maple tree is also showing no signs of life.  If I look around at other Maples, I see some buds bursting open on *some* of the tips, but a further look around the neighborhood and I see plenty of trees that haven't broken dormancy yet.  A scrape on this one shows a little bit of green, but the tree itself feels a little 'hollow'.    This

Last Summer, we visited Disneyland Paris and one of the things that both Natalie and I were struck by was the landscaping outside of Phantom Manor .  They had these trees that were all curly and the foliage looked like it was dying and twisted.  A little bit of digging when we got home turned up that the trees that we were seeing were most likely Harry Lauder's Walkingstick .  It was then that I started to think about contorted trees as a thing - and (potentially) a thing for our own yard.  I mentioned in this post about a contorted Larch tree that I thought it was interesting to consider adding to our yard.  I've been giving a lot of thought to the types of trees we should be adding - and have posted about most of them.  Getting a contorted tree was tops on my list for this season.  Well...on a recent Sunday, we took a drive out to The Growing Place in Aurora where they had their nursery set up as a 'drive through'.  You stay in your car and drive through the

Over the past few years, I've posted a few times about Japanese-inspired gardening and how I'm increasingly drawn to it for various reasons.  I spent a bit of time walking around Gotenyama Gardens in Tokyo and as I walked down the steps into the kind-of sunken garden, I was surrounded by a lush garden in the middle of a metropolitan city.   And that fascination with Japanese gardens has manifested itself in a couple of things, but mostly columnar trees .  But, there are other elements that I've talked about including ferns and this Japanese Forest Grass , too.  One of the types of tree that I don't seem to have covered at all here on the blog is a Japanese Maple tree.  I've seen them at the garden center over the past few years and they're always tempting (and pricey), but I didn't know too much about them to ever make a decision on them.  This Winter, I started to poke around them as thinking about this part of our yard and wanted to get a little bit smar

Two days ago, I posted the first findings of using the caliper measurement tool on our young trees with this post showing the caliper measurements of our Frans Fontaine European Hornbeam trees in the backyard.  Today, I'm documenting in the [garden diary] the rest of our young backyard trees which all came from nursery stock.  I did the same thing on these that I did on the Hornbeams:  measured six inches from the ground and marked each of the trunks. First up is the pair of Greenspire Lindens that we've put up as an esaplier .  First is the one on the right (facing them).  Then the one on the left (facing them).  This one is slightly larger. Then the Weeping White Spruce that I planted mid-Summer 2019 and is dealing with it's first Winter below: One of the backyard Chanticleer Flowering Pear trees - this one along the south fence line below.  This tree was planted on Earth Day 2018 and was a really tiny tree (and was cheap, too!) to start. The sm

A couple of days ago, I shared a photo of the new caliper measurement tool that Nat picked up for me on Amazon so I can get some better measurement of our young trees in the yard.  I have been tracking the heights of my newly added trees to the yard for the past couple of years (here's this Summer's measurements and here's last Summer measurements ), but some of the trees are getting more than ten feet tall and using a conventional tape measure to accurate reflect their growth is difficult.  Between not being able to reach (and be at eye level) with the very top of the tree and the reality to some of the tree's 'growth' isn't always in height, but in branching out and what-have-you. Like I've done with the heights (which...for many of the trees, I'll still do during the late Summer), I'm going to document caliper measurements on a regular basis.  I'm thinking that I'll do a semi-annual measurement this year (now + Summer) to see if th