Cait's Garden

Actually, I don’t know if these are good people. I just saw this house while out for a walk recently. For all I know, these people deserve their landscaping.

You can see why they felt the need for some landscaping in this street-facing side yard of theirs. They have a blindingly white faux-wood picket fence that needed to be softened. They also have very little space between the fence and the sidewalk. So some helpful landscaping company (and it was a professional company…I saw them planting these) came up with the brilliant plan of “arborvitae, daylily, arborvitae, daylily” all the way down this very long stretch of fence.

Now I’m a fan of arborvitaes. I have them along the fence in my backyard. They can provide great cover for an unappealing fence. However, one should never assume the same plants will grow up at the same rate. You never know what flaws may be lurking in the plants or the ground below them. And when you set up landscaping with such a highly visible pattern as in the photo above, you are setting yourself up for a disappointing result if one or more of the plants suddenly becomes stunted or diseased. Not to mention, who had the idea of daylilies here? Not that they aren’t pretty flowers, but let’s face it, they give you flowers for about two weeks in midsummer and then you are left with nothing but spidery messy foliage for the rest of the season. Ugh.

I’m not sure how I would’ve handled this issue. Perhaps I wouldn’t have tried to cover the entire length of the fence, choosing instead a few pockets of landscaping activity. Or perhaps I might’ve gone with a shrub that is nearly indestructible no matter how hard you have to prune it, like honeysuckle. For filler plants, I would’ve chosen catmint. They give you full, reliable foliage and purple flowers ALL summer, not just for two weeks. Arborvitae can be fussy shrubs and all their flaws will be exposed in the arrangement above. I’ll be interested to see how this plan pans out over time.