Recent Entries to this Blog Melrose and Energy
Posted: 13 Jun 2008
Bringing Back Melrose - The Grounds
Posted: 12 Mar 2008
Melrose Offers No Victories Without Defeats
Posted: 30 May 2008
Moving Forward at Melrose
Posted: 29 Jan 2008
WHAT IF YOU JUST DO THE WHOLE PLACE IN KHAKI?
Posted: 11 Dec 2007

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Bringing Back Melrose - The Grounds

Category: gardens and old home renovation | Posted: Wed Mar 12, 2008 6:57 pm

Spring has sprung in Eastern North Carolina. The farm land is being prepared for the cotton, corn, soy beans, and peanuts that will soon rise from that good earth. Fruit trees are in bloom. The climbing rose in back of Melrose is leafing out, and everywhere you look, the point is driven home that winter is in the past tense. We hope.

We're now trying to get down to Melrose every other weekend, and for the first time, we're now going down on Fridays after work and staying two nights in the otherwise empty house. A few weeks back, we took twelve apple trees down and had them planted in an area now optimistically called the orchard. We're told that in about four years, we'll start having apples. My hope is that time and energy will allow turning lots of those apples into cider, and to give excess apples to people of the area. I really look forward to the apple cider making under autumn skies.

The orchard area is only a matter of feet from a street that borders Melrose land.. Since I have long agreed with Robert Frost that good fences make good neighbors, I started looking for some climbing roses that would be hardy as the devil, tall as a fence, and flower for the better part of the spring, summer and fall. Somewhere in my mad dash through internet sites on climbing roses, I came across the name of a variety I had never heard of, and found a source at a Canadian company called Hortico. The three bare root bushes I bought will be planted this weekend, and I'm hoping that when full grown they will discourage dogs, deer and other critters from wandering into the orchard.

When we first bought Melrose, the outside was a full blown mess. It was overgrown, volunteer trees and bushes were everywhere, and trash in large black bags had been piled for years in the back and fertilized with copious amounts of dead leaves. There was also the occasional cast iron piping, discarded tools, and old wiring. It was beyond mess. It was galaxian in scope. Since then, I have had the black bags and eons-worth of old leaves carted off, along with some of the most obvious other clutter. Volunteer plants have been retired to the brush pile, and attempts to plant grass have been made (more about that later).

If there was one mistake we made initially, it was to have cut down a wall of trees and bushes and kudzu and honeysuckle and Lord only knows what else that formed a barrier between one side of the Melrose property and a fairly large complex of municipal buildings that sits next door. When the nearly impenetrable wall of greenery was taken down, I immediately knew we had made an error. All of the municipal complex which has been hidden was now visually cheek-by-jowl with Melrose. It will take years and untold numbers of plants to fill in that space. Why did we take down the wall of stuff? Well, it had kudzu and honeysuckle. That seemed enough of a provocation at the time. In retrospect, I think I could have come to love kudzu and honeysuckle.

The one good thing that came from that project was the presence amidst that jungle of a couple of struggling trees which were heavily draped in mammoth vines. A lot of limbs on those trees had to be sacrificed during jungle removal, and when the work was finished, one of the trees looked for-all-the-world like it had been created by Dr. Seuss to grace a page in Horton Hears a Who.

The front grounds at Melrose amount to a great piece of land going out to the main street, on which grow nearly a half dozen ancient oaks. They are massive and lovely, but they rain leaves, broken twigs and branches on the soil below. There had once been a a white picket fence along the street, with a gate opening onto a long walkway flanked on both sides by large English box woods. So, from the street, a visitor would have looked up the boxwood alley to Melrose's front façade with its four great antebellum columns. It must have been quite a site.

Today, the fence is only remembered thru faded photographs. Most of the boxwood is gone, and what remains is having a near-death experience. Lichen covers the branches of the only two boxwood bushes worth saving, and even that effort of resuscitation may be futile because of their age. Beside one of the two bushes is a large and neglected gardenia bush that I intend to revive if the gardening gods will only bless my efforts. And close by is a scraggily tea rose bush that, against all odds, puts out flowers during the summer months. I admire its courage and am trying to salvage it as well.

There is a long, circular drive from the street up to the house, and along its edges grow several large bushes, including two wonderful sasanqua camellias that are now in bloom. I'm fortunate to have them and the others that are at home on the front grounds. However....

Bill, the fellow who is helping me bring back the grounds around Melrose, is a grand person to work with, and so when he tries something on my behalf and it does not work as expected, I tend not to blame him, but to look for some other reason. Much of the front property is just a big open space that may once have been the place where former owners put a glider swing or lawn chairs to cool themselves in the shade of late afternoons. But, by the time we arrived on the scene, that space generally was barren, pretty much covered by oak leaves and dead branches. Being the inveterate suburbanite that I was then, I immediately hoped to see a lawn restored to that area, and I immediately placed an order for grass seed to be sown. That was last spring. Much of the seed did sprout, and for at least a month, there was greenness where once there was brownness. Sadly, the whole idea began to wilt and die during the ensuing drought that hammered all of North Carolina in 2007. By summer's end, most of the new grass appeared dead, and the oak leaves and dead branches seemed once again to be winning.

Recently, Bill and I stood looking at the front grounds, commiserating on the apparent failure of our grass growing venture, when I had a thought, something that happens once or twice a year to me regardless of whether I am trying or not. I looked at the area where grass appeared to have gone with the wind, and I looked at the camellias that are doing wonderfully, and I wondered why? Then I began thinking about all those oak leaves that had fallen over those front grounds over all those generations and I wondered whether the soil there was too acid for grass to thrive, but was just peachy for acid loving plants like camellias. Bill allowed as how that just might be possible, and has taken it upon himself to have soil tests done to see whether I'm a crack pot or possibly sane.

Something else that Bill has done is gather up most of the oak leaves that had matted the grounds all winter long, and when he did so, we found that not all of the grass had died-- most of it, but not all. That at least holds promise that should I want to follow the original idea of having a lawn out there, perhaps doing enough liming over a long enough period of time will let grass thrive there. Except...

In view of high gas costs, global warming and how little use most lawns ever get, I'd like to have something other than a lawn on the front grounds at Melrose. If possible, I'd like to use that space for plantings that will thrive in the acid soil that had built up over the decades. I'd love more camellias out there, if I can get them established despite the ongoing drought.

There are two other areas of the Melrose grounds that occupy a good bit of my thinking.

One is a large pile of bricks representing all that is left of the detached kitchen which once served the needs of Melrose's owners. It burned down long ago, and the old bricks from which it was made have provided a haven for vines that have nasty stickers and proto trees with sick smelling sap, not to mention the likely presence of critters creeping and slithering. It's the slithering ones that give me pause. Still, I have begun attacking that thicket, and hope by summer to have only the brick pile in all of its ugly glory. After that, I don't know what to do with the pile. Eventually, it would be nice to have the bricks cleaned of mortar and used to edge plants, etc. Then, I would put a marker on the spot of the former kitchen to note for future generations where it was. We'll see.

While the old kitchen burned down, three other out-buildings did not go up in smoke, and being the nutty professor of gardening and landscapdom, I view them not just as buildings, but also as adjuncts to an overall landscape design. One building in particular is much on my mind. Back in the days when Melrose was at the heart of a farm, the building in question was used to store, among other things, hay. Matter of fact, there is some old hay in there now. Problem is that the tin-roofed building has a nice barn double door that faces away from present-day Melrose property. The doors open out onto municipal land, whereas I'd like it to face out to the orchard. What to do? What I think about is one day having the building hoisted up and turned around. Either that or cutting a door in the back of the back One or tuther.

Of the two other out buildings, one is a small barn-like structure in which is now stored a great pile of old things taken from Melrose over heaven-only-knows how many years. There are old and much rotted shutters, old spindles, rusted pieces of plumbing, etc. One day, one poor blighter will have to go in there and decide what to do with all of that. With any kind of luck, I'll pass into that great garden in the sky long before I pull that task out of the job jar.

The third building is my favorite- a small, square building perhaps eight or nine feet across, that sits on stilts, so that it is about four or five feet off the ground. A nice set of wooden steps leads to the entrance. The moment I first laid eyes on that little building, I imagined it as a three-season getaway from dogs and grandchildren and such. It's all part of my Thomas Jefferson complex, where I see myself off alone contemplating the meaning of life or, at least, deciding on when best to start making apple cider. One day, for sure, I will retire to that spot with cold lemonade and think about just how wonderful and decent life can be.



Last edited: Tue Jun 03, 2008 8:33 pm

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Comments

 

Droopy wrote on Wed Mar 12, 2008 7:25 pm:


Congratulations on your orchard. I'm sorry about your green wall, hope you'll be able to replace it as time goes by. Good luck with your camellia and out buildings project. I've helped making cider. It was hard work.




 

CritterPainter wrote on Wed Mar 12, 2008 11:33 pm:


I wondered how things were going there! Good news about the orchard, we used to press them every year, there's nothing like cider you catch just as it rolls off the cider chute. Too bad about the view, but kudzu deserves death wherever it sticks it's invasive self! Could you use the bricks to frame in a kitchen-garden? seems fitting. Keep up the good work!




 

Netty wrote on Thu Mar 13, 2008 7:36 pm:


Melrose sure keeps you busy SouthernCurrent. I really enjoy reading your entries and look forward to the next.





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