The Gardens

Back Hill

Our lot was cleared in 2003 and our house was built in 2004.  After the bulldozers left, the back hill was a bare patch, waiting to fill up with invasive bittersweet, multiflora rose, poison ivy and autumn olive.  Later Japanese barberry started growing everywhere too.

March 28, 2006

I started planting tiny trees, and encased them in deer protector plastic tubes. Red maples, oaks, sweetgums, black gums, a couple yellow birches, persimmons, and sassafras, which took dozens of saplings to get even a few to grow.  Ironwood, a couple Norway spruces, white pines. Volunteer sumacs and silver maples and junipers and tuliptrees were allowed to grow where they seeded.

June 14, 2006

I replaced the white plastic tubes with green plastic mesh tubes.  A little easier to look at.

May 13, 2007

In only a few years the saplings were getting taller.
August 7, 2009

October 11, 2010

October 11, 2011

October 25, 2011

On Halloween, 2011, a devastating early snowstorm took down several trees on the back hill. The lush, big, leafy tuliptree came down (seen just days before in the photo above -- the tall green tree in the middle).

May 18, 2012

September 26, 2012

October 5, 2012

October 16, 2012

May 18, 2013

October 5, 2013

Over the years there has been much ribbing about my forest and how I won't live to see my planted trees grow big. But by 2014 it had happened. While the houses and road are visible in winter, by summer the screening is complete and nothing is visible through the forest of trees.
January 5, 2014

May 31, 2014

In autumn the back hill is a lovely colorful backdrop to the gardens and yard.
September 24, 2014

September 27, 2014

The trees are still young but no longer slender saplings. I add more each year and those I planted most recently are still small, and won't contribute to the forest for years yet. But the original saplings I planted starting in 2006 really do look like a natural wooded hillside now, and you can't see through them all summer.

By spring of 2015 the daffodils were starting to make a nice scene.
4/25/15

In summer the trees have all grown enough to really screen the road -- I can't see it at all. But of course fall is the best season for the forest on the back hill.
Throughout the month of October 2015