Half the people who come to Theory Corner are cartoonists, and I hate to say anything that'll offend them, but.....it has to be said....most cartoonists live in homes with ugly backyards (above). I wonder why that is? Maybe we just have our minds on other things. Maybe most cartoonists can't afford expensive landscaping.
Lately I'm considering doing something about my own backyard (not shown here). It's not ugly, but it's not exactly beautiful either. I wonder what I could do to beef it up that would require almost no exertion and almost no money?
You can learn a lot from comparing these two pictures. For me Lesson #1 one just jumps out at you: plant evergreen trees. The pine tree is the only plant in the two pictures that looked equally good in both winter and summer. The Wisteria tree (the weeping willow-type tree on the right) on the other hand, looked great in the warm weather photo (above) but almost vanished in the winter picture (top). lots of trees and shrubs are like that: great in the summer and horrible in the winter. I don't know about you, but I want a garden that looks good all year round.
Lesson #2: Wooden fences help a lot. I like the Japanese kind (not shown). If you're stuck with a neighbor's wire storm fence then grow thick, fragrant jasmine vines on it. Jasmine is free. You can grow it from cuttings.
Lesson #3: A nice ground cover helps. Grass usually requires mulching, and fussing over weeds that grow in the mulch. All of that violates the lazy gardener's code. The couple that laid down the grass in the top two pictures avoided mulching. They just cut the existing grass short then covered it with black landscapers fabric held down by rocks. After a few weeks the existing grass and weeds died under the fabric. New grass was planted and...well, you see the result.
Interesting, huh?
BTW: Thanks to Rogelio I'm able to identify the blog that I stole two of these interesting pictures from:
http://aubreyandlindsay.blogspot.com/2010/06/privacy-screen-project-final-reveal.html