Chaos -- it's taking over my back yard

Chaos. It's what's for breakfast.  Here's a bit of chaos inducing silliness from the Psychiatry Department.

Which number would you push? (Actually, it makes more sense than most medical/psychiatry deparmtent phone answering systems).

Closer to home... we have more chaos

My back yard has turned into a jungle.  This is the price I pay for being too damned lazy busy to maintain it myself.  Realistically, we hire folks to cut the lawn because the summer months tend to mean that I'm gone for a whole month, and the Golf Pro is gone for four days at a time on and off all summer.  To avoid the recurring jungle phenomenon, we hire folks.  We used to have great folks.  

I've recently learned that the people I've hired to mow the lawn and weed whack the be edges daren't actually whack the edges because they evidently can't tell the difference between a weed and a plant, and thus fear whacking a plant.  If it's not fear of plants, its fear of hoses -- they can't whack one bed because the hose is too close to the edge.

Realizing the limitations of the weed whacker, and my own limitations as a weed hunter, I've even hired folks to spray deadly chemicals on certain types of weeds (I have found no non-toxic solution to the thistles that think this is the spawning ground from heaven).  They have evidently been spraying fertilizer instead. The bad kind of chaos has taken over.

My favorite lawn savior is out there now preparing to fill the back of his pick up truck with plant debris and haul it away.  I am not amused that I'm paying him to fix what I've already paid to previously paid to prevent. I wish like crazy that I could hire HIM to do the stuff that my current "team" has failed so miserably at, but he's only in town about four days a month.

I'm similarly unamused that I'll be making scads of phone calls to try to find people who a) know what they're doing, b) aren't afraid to do what you hire them to do and c) don't think it's reasonable to charge $55.00 per hour to do work that requires very little training. One fellow thinks it's sane to charge me $80.00 to mow my lawn and whack the weeds -- once!  (I struggle with that since I can't get a job that pays even half that).  I'm even less amused that I have to make 20 calls leaving messages before I can even talk to one person about the possibilities. 

However, touring the chaos that is now my back yard reminds me -- If you look closely enough, some of the good kind of chaos still shows.

This is the grass plant that we're going to have to cut out because it's overgrown all sense of civility and restraint and is trying to take over the yard...

 

Most disturbing to me is that despite having been vigorously trimmed (whacked to almost nothing) it's growing far larger than it was ever supposed to get, and is squishing the lovely dogwood that we planted so that we could enjoy the variegated leaves and the red twigs it will show in winter...

It is still kind of pretty to look closely between the blades...

 

But wait, what's that yellow blob?

 

Isn't she amazing?

And there are some plants that I was sure had long since stopped blooming, but which are pulling out one last effort.

That clematis was stunning in June.  But mostly, it's been ... well... a boring old vine.  I love surprises like that.

I'm not so fond of volunteers gone mad.  Do you see anything... awkward... about the path beyond the bridge?

 

How about now?

 

Yeah.  It might well grow into a lovely tree of some kind.  But not there.  And not in any of the other dozen or so places that particular beastie is thriving around the yard.  They're going the way of the half dozen mulberry volunteers.

At least not all of the volunteers are undesireables... There are things appearing in the planters that I didn't put there, well, at least not this year (nor in fact for the past three years).  Chaos... in a good way.

 

There's even a volunteer dogwood in the front yard that we actively want to keep!

And finally, two things that are thriving, without having been over taken by weeds... right where I put them.

 

Still fascinating to me... and still lovely with this growing right behind it.

 

Days like this I almost want a condo.... but I still revel in the beauty of a garden, even a feral one.

Comments

[D]

As we'd been curious about it, I poked a bit & the lovely lady was a common garden spider, aka Argiope aurantia.

[kmkat]

I think pampas grass is outlawed in some states because of its, er, vigorous growth habit.

The tree in the middle of the path looks dangerous to me, kind of like a storm trooper standing in the passageway of the Death Star, just waiting for an excuse to kill someone.

Love the flowers, though!