Landscapes Made of Ticky-Tacky





Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same.
There's a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one,
And they're all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

Malvina Reynolds wrote it, Pete Seeger sang it, and for the past several weeks, I’ve been having to look at it as I drive by a housing development where the foundation plantings all look just the same. There’s a red one, and a yellow one, and a green one, and a gold one, and they’re all made of invasive Japanese barberry, and they all look just the same.

There are no fewer than a half-dozen of these homes with the same landscaping, side by side, visible from the road. The primary difference between them is the color of the dyed mulch. One could argue whether the cultured stone on the façade of these houses should be considered a “natural” look. However the largest portion of each of the lots is in conservation easement, so the back yards are forested, with large rock outcrops. Wrong plants in the wrong place. Ugly. Hmmmmn. As chair of the Environmental Commission, I guess I still have more work to do.

This is the perfect example of too much of a good thing. Folks around here like Japanese barberry because the deer don’t. But the birds spread the seed far and wide, to the point where we now have wine-colored ones popping up in the woods. Give the chartreuse variety a few more years and I’m sure we’ll be seeing that as well.

Good alternatives are native Bayberry, Beautyberry, and Blueberry, as well as the non-invasive Cotoneasters (watch out for Frenchet and Silverleaf).

But all of that environmental stuff aside, come on landscapers, let’s show a little imagination! A string of nearly identical houses, with identical plants, in nearly identical rows is, well, just plain tacky.

Popular posts from this blog

Detention Basins: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Image
In our area, stormwater sewers that serve housing developments and some businesses empty into the dreaded detention (or retention, or infiltration) basin, a visually hideous engineered method of holding large volumes of water until it can safely disperse to groundwater, natural streams, ponds, etc. (top photo). These are generally grass monocultures or rip rap which, if not properly maintained become weedy, overgrown maintenance nightmares. Suffice it to say that anyone who can get away with not maintaining one will continue to not maintain it. Frequently, the town ends up owning and maintaining such basins, meaning that all the taxpayers pay. When grass is used as the only groundcover and pesticides and fertilizers are applied, they can contaminate the runoff. Regular mowing of the basins is difficult because of the steep sides and wet floor. This maintenance adds contaminants to the watercourse, as well. Grass basins also attract undesirable wildlife, such as Canada Geese, which ...
Keep reading

Please Garden Responsibly. Because What You Spray in Your Garden Doesn’t Stay in Your Garden

Image
American Lady caterpillar on licorice plant. Photo: Courtesy Missouri Botanical Garden Scores of their silky tents covered the licorice plant in the container on my porch. Inside the tents, something was gobbling up the leaves faster than I could pick them off. The plant must have been infested when I bought it. As I reached for my organic insecticide, I thought, “Wait, you don’t know what kind of caterpillars these are!” I recalled an article on pest management by a friend who cautioned: “Sometimes, the best treatment is no treatment at all.” It took the better part of the afternoon for me to identify the miniature mowing machines. In the meantime, half of them had started dropping from their perches and wriggling off into the underbrush. I hoped I had made the right decision. The licorice plant was devastated. But then I noticed that the caterpillars had not eaten the leaves all the way down to the stem. Possibly, secondary buds could sprout and still provide a silvery...
Keep reading

Musings on the Relativity of Time and The Arithmetic of Overpopulation

Image
I celebrated my birthday recently. Beyond a certain age, birthdays become a double-edged sword. You’re glad you made it to the next one, but realize that there are far fewer years ahead of you than behind you. The list of absent friends grows ever longer. Colleagues grow grey; everyone else looks like they just graduated from middle school. I used to console myself by calculating that I still had at least 2 5 more years to go, which made the end point seem very far off. But, now that would mean I’d live to an unrealistically old age, a concept supported by neither family history nor actuarial tables. I’m reminded of Einstein’s summary of his Theory of Relativity: "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour." I guess I’ve been having too much fun. But that can’t go on forever. My immortality would not be good for the planet. It’s not sustainable. At the same time that medical advances have...
Keep reading