Before and After: Dejungling My Almost Landscape
October 26th, 2021
It’s hard to believe three years have gone by since my wife and I moved from our long-time home (and gardens) in Cumberland County to the suburbs of Pittsburgh.
Me “dejungling” the inherited “landscaping.”
The house we bought was in worse shape than it looked, and we’ve spent a ton of money and sweat equity fixing everything.
The outside has been just as much of an uphill battle, but at least we could see what we got ourselves into there.
After three years of pulling weeds, cutting down dead trees, scratching poison-ivy rashes, lugging wall stones, putting up fences, shooing deer, digging drainage ditches, working compost into Play-Doh-like “soil,” moving mountains of mulch, and finally, planting, I can say the yard is starting to look almost like a landscape now instead of a jungle.
Also that I’m tired. And frequently sore. The good news, though, is that I accomplished all of the above with only one trip to the emergency room.
Things are far enough along now that I thought I’d give you a sort of “before and after” rundown of what I did and why – both to help with any re-do’s you might have in the works as well as for your general amusement (and/or horror, as the case may be).
I should mention right off the bat that the neighbors told us that the previous owners were scarcely outside in the eight years they lived there. They had moved out altogether for the two years before we bought.
I was suspicious about their yard-care acumen the one time I met the previous owner-guy. As we were walking around the yard, I asked him what was under that 4-by-8-foot timber-lined box that was next to the shed and covered with a well-worn sheet of plywood.
He said, “I don’t know,” which I found to be a strange answer for someone who’d been living there for eight years.
It turns out the mystery box was a sandbox from two owners ago. That was clue No. 1 that maybe the recent owners weren’t spending a lot of time out in the yard.
Anyway, let’s start at the driveway leading up to the house…
The steps to the back door split a pair of brick-supported, terraced beds that probably went up when the house was built in the 1950s. When we got there, both beds were overtaken with floppy grasses, seeded-in euonymus, and rose-of-sharons that had grown into a mini-forest, and lots of weeds.
My solution (after first clearing out all of the junky vegetation) was to install a fence (above). One reason was to draw a boundary between the driveway beds and the back yard. Another one was to give some privacy to the back yard. And a third reason was to keep the herds of local deer out of the back yard.
We went with a low-maintenance, white-vinyl fence and used a wooden, gated arbor we brought with us from Cumberland County as the “doorway” into the back yard. We painted it white to match the fence.
To the right of the arbor, the terraced bed curves around to blend in with a steep, 20-foot bank that runs the whole way along the driveway. Most of it was weed-covered when we moved in with runoff from the neighbor’s higher property cutting a few gullies down the bank.
I first cleared this area and then built a pair of new terraces to slow the runoff and erosion, mostly using stones scavenged from a back-yard retaining wall that had long fallen down.
I also ran drainage pipe through the bank to carry runoff from the back yard out to the front storm-sewer system.
With the new retaining walls in place, I backfilled and leveled with topsoil and then planted in a layered layout – a Scarlet Fire Kousa dogwood at the top, then dwarf lilacs, dwarf panicle hydrangeas, dwarf Virginia sweetspires, and dwarf summersweets in the middle, then liriope, hardy geraniums, and a few spots of annual flowers across the bottom.
The terrace to the left of the arbor also had deteriorated into floppy grasses and weeds.
I cleared that one off as well and bookended the top with a Dee Runk boxwood and a dwarf Hinoki cypress, then planted three Summer Crush hydrangeas along the new fence that are fronted with Silver Heart variegated brunnera. Astilbe and a few annuals finish off the front. 
The arbor now gives a new view into the beds I’ve added in the back yard.
The area just inside that fence – at the landing atop the driveway bank – was a mess. Weeds, floppy grasses, dead conifers, and a long-abandoned/weedy planter box were in this area, which also was frequently wet from a serious drainage issue on a large backyard bank.
This jumble was so overgrown that it had completely obscured a nice, curving, knee-high retaining wall that some past owner built.
This area seemed like the best place in the yard for a vegetable garden – mostly sunny, near the kitchen door, and with some work, potentially level.
I first uncovered the obscured wall, then extended it with as close of wall stone as I could find – the whole way over to where the new fence was going in.
I backfilled the wall, leveled the area with a gazillion wheelbarrow loads of wood chips from cut-down dead trees, then built six-inch boxes for the veggie beds.
This is where the ER visit comes in. While trying to hammer stakes in the wretched, rock-laden ground, I whacked my left index finger with a two-pound mallet. I don’t recommend this. Six stitches stopped the bleeding.
After filling in the boxes with compost and mushroom soil and working that into the native “soil,” I had a working vegetable garden.
Outside the kitchen door, we started with more weedy space that just ran right down into the driveway terrace. It also flooded during heavy rains.
The new fence separated the driveway terrace (visible from out front) from the slightly more level kitchen-door space (visible only from the back), giving us what we now call the “kitchen garden.” We planted it mostly in bird- and hummingbird-attracting flowers and small shrubs, both for the color and for the flying entertainment that we see out the window from our kitchen table.
Back down on the driveway, a bed along another brick retaining wall to the left of the garage was mostly bare and mainly a repository for falling tree leaves. At least not many weeds…
I improved the soil there and planted a warm-colored bed using shade-tolerant plants, since the area is under a large maple and in shade all day. I lined the driveway with golden variegated Japanese forest grass and interplanted/backdropped it with helleborus, epimedium, a dark-leafed ‘Britt-Marie Crawford’ ligularia, an orange flame azalea, coleus, a ‘Sweet Tea’ foamybells, and annual Vancouver geraniums and orange begonias (both of which the deer have eaten).
That bank along the whole right side of the driveway was weedy, eroding, and uneven when I found it. Above is what it looked like after I cleared it but before I did any improving.
Using more of those stones scavenged from the fallen back-bank wall (plus some I brought from Cumberland County and some I bought), I built a knee-high, dry-stacked, serpentine wall a few feet from the bottom of the bank.
This helped reduce the grade of the bank and let me backfill and level enough to make the bank more workable.
Since I have shade, oak-root competition, and deer pressure out there in addition to thin, lousy, bank soil, I went with plant choices that give me at least a fighting chance – viburnums, fothergilla, variegated Solomon’s seal, three dwarf variegated weigelas, and pachysandra.
I’ve tried a few annuals, too, such as impatiens and the pink geraniums in the above photo, but deer ate them.
To the front right entrance of the driveway were a few stacked boulders. Grass had grown up to them, but it looked to me as if someone at one time had planted around them (or planned to).
This was one of the easier changes. I just dug out a few feet around the boulders, improved the soil, and planted a rock garden, using switchgrasses as a backdrop with Suncredible sunflowers to the left, and creeping sedum, coleus, coreopsis, and gaillardia along the front.
Also out front, I added a new garden around the mailbox.
The front of the house was more bare than jungle-like when we found it. It had a couple of scraggly yews by the front door with lacebug-infested lavender azaleas (a poor color match for orangish-red brick) in front of the two front picture windows.
The yews are gone and replaced by a pair of upright Dee Runk boxwoods flanking each corner of the front stoop. The azaleas are going next spring, to be replaced by two trios of gold-variegated boxwoods. (Deer hardly ever mess with boxwoods.)
I widened and improved the rest of the foundation beds and added a lot more warm-hued color – mostly from sun-loving annuals that the deer don’t like, such as dwarf zinnias, marigolds, and lantana.
I’ve also added a mix of flowering shrubs – leucothoe, a dwarf nandina, a dwarf oakleaf hydrangea, a golden Lemony Lace elderberry, ‘Baggesen’s Gold’ box honeysuckles, and a Kodiak Black diervilla in the shadier areas and sterile dwarf butterfly bushes, relocated existing golden spireas, and a pair of peachy dwarf abelias in the sunnier areas.
Golden ‘Angelina’ creeping sedum edges much of the front foundation border.
We also added a new light post along the steps leading up to the front door from the driveway. I built a garden around that, anchoring the post with a ‘Red Star’ Atlantic whitecedar, a pair of Mellow Yellow spireas, and patches of creeping sedum and warm-colored annuals (red-gold bidens this year, as shown in the above photo).
To the left of the house out front was a rather old, brown, wooden fence that was beginning to rot. Near the gate was an old pin oak tree that was dying. It had big limbs and a location that could flatten part of our house roof if/when it failed.
I had the hazard tree removed first of all. Then after getting a ridiculously expensive bid for a new fence, I decided to tear down the wooden fence myself and install a new vinyl fence to match the one we had installed two years ago out back.
That job was brutal because of the rock layer lurking as shallow as 18 inches under the clay. I did a lot of chipping, picking, and concreting to get the posts sturdy enough in place, narrowly escaping another ER visit when my knee got T-boned by a rented gas-powered post-hole digger that kept locking up when it hit the rock and big roots from the cut-down oak.
Once the fence was done and up (a glorious moment), I cut a four-foot-wide bed along the front of it and planted with sun-loving, deer-resistant perennials – dwarf Russian sage, betony ‘Hummelo,’ coneflowers ‘Powwow Wild Berry,’ allium ‘Milennium,’ and lavender Phenomenal.
A pair of ‘Trautman’ columnar blue junipers flank the new fence gate, upright boxwoods ‘Green Mountain’ front each fence post, and annual blue salvias add spot-color to the rest.
The far left end of the yard was a wooded area that had filled in with under-story weeds and invasives, such as euonymus, privet, and rose-of-sharon. About half of the seeded-in trees in this partly sloped were dead.
Although I hate cutting down trees, I had to get rid of the dead and dying ones first. Most of them were diseased Scotch pines and blue spruce. Using wood chips from the cut-down trees, I spread a three- to four-inch layer of chips over most of this bed after culling out the weeds and invasives. (These are the chips I also used to level out under the vegetable garden.)
After a year of letting the chips rot, we set about planting a dwarf-conifer garden. That was on my wife’s wish list, and this spot gets enough morning to midday sun that I think conifers will do fine. It also helps that deer aren’t big fans of conifer appetizers.
It’s going to take years for this slow-growing garden to really look good, but it’s mostly planted and spruced up for now with a “crevice garden” of succulents that my wife has been planting.
As if I didn’t have enough to do beating back a jungle, my big front lawn died last year during a very hot and dry spell. I think it was a combination of thatch, poor soil, poor grass quality, disease, and the fact that the lawn is bounded on two sides by asphalt roads (meaning extra heat, hot summer wind from passing cars, and salty slush from winter plowing).
I reseeded the whole lawn last fall and just got done overseeding again with turf-type tall fescue to give me as much diversity in assorted conditions as possible.
I’ve also been attempting to shrink the lawn (it’s much bigger than I wanted) by planting trees and adding at least planted circles (if not whole gardens) around them.
Besides adding color and diversity and breaking up the huge sea of green, I’m hoping the shade will cool the area over time and turn a monoculture into more of an ecosystem.
Read more on my tree-plantings so far
The back yard – inside that rotting brown fence – was a rather dreary place. It was wet from the drainage issues above, shaded from a huge silver maple, and muddy since grass had long died.
The area was also so humid and low-energy that it led to algae growing on the house trim back there.
Sitting all by itself was a shed with a rotting ramp. That big silver maple was growing next to it and had a huge limb hanging over it that would easily flatten the whole structure if/when it came down.
Again, the first order of business was having the silver maple cut down. This non-native is considered by some to be a “junk tree,” but my main concern was the hazard limb and the undesirable microclimate it was creating.
What a big difference it made when the silver maple and that half-dead pin oak outside the fence both came down.
Sun now came in, the mud dried up, the algae stopped growing on the house, and I was able to add several mixed beds, increasing the back-yard’s plant diversity. I was also able to get new grass going to replace the soggy ground that was bumpy from the surface roots of the silver maple.
I then built a playhouse for the grandkids next to the shed. My wife and I painted and trimmed the two buildings to match, and we added flower boxes to both. Things look a lot cheerier back there now. All we have to do yet is replace the brown roof on the shed to match the gray one we put on the playhouse.
Although I had a lot of “challenges” with this yard, I’d have to rate the back bank as the toughest of them. At more than 100 feet across and between 25 and 40 feet deep, this was a big area – and mostly on a sharp slope close to 45 degrees.
Euonymus, wild grape, and English-ivy vines were growing 40 feet up into the trees – some of which were already dead and others that were dying from disease and the vine-shading of their foliage.
Assorted other weeds (including poison ivy) were growing all over the bank, including remnants from some earlier attempt to tame it, such as creeping euonymus, ivy, and tawny daylilies – those hard-to-kill invaders that are often seen growing in roadside drainage ditches.
Making matters worse, a huge torrent of runoff came pouring down the bank from the neighbor’s house above. During heavy rains, it’s like someone has opened a giant fire hose, focused on the top right of my bank.
Runoff doesn’t just run off during a storm. It gushes with enough force to carry small rocks down the hill, not to mention soil.
So much water comes down the hill that it results in waterfalls dropping massive amounts of water off the wall and into the yard below. Click on the video link above to get an idea.
I tried mulching the bank after clearing one section of it, and above is what happened to the mulch after the first heavy rain.
One of the first things I did with this bank is pull the vines out of the trees. I also cut down the smaller dead trees and removed most of the bigger weeds.
As you can imagine, it made quite a refuse pile. I chipped up the woody stuff and bigger pieces to use as mulch and chopped and composted the vegetative stuff. That was a ton of work.
The next project was attempting to at least mitigate the massive runoff problem. I dug an 18-inch-deep pit at the top that’s retained by large stones. I backfilled it with drainage stones with the idea of slowing the force of the “fire hose” and allowing the water to soak in and spill out of the pit instead of gush straight down the hill.
I then dug a stone-filled trench down the hill to direct and carry the spillover, plus built a wooden bridge for foot traffic to cross over this stream bed.
The photo above shows the three-foot-wide, stone-filled trench I dug to direct runoff down the hill.
That helped tame the runoff a good bit, but it didn’t stop lots of water from ending up in the yard below. To help with that, I dug a few catch basins and installed buried drainage pipe that I ran along the driveway and out to the storm-sewer system along the road.
With all of that brute-force labor out of the way, I began improving the soil and planting the bank. I did this in sections. Above is the right side of the bank, which I’ve planted with some edibles (corn, asparagus, squash, raspberries, a fig tree) and some ornamentals (David Austin roses, Hinoki cypress, a ‘Sem’ sorbaria, three dwarf Lil’ Ditty viburnums, a weeping Alaska cedar, a Black Lace elderberry, etc.)
I planted the upper middle section with an Oriental spruce and a trio of ‘Green Giant’ arborvitae – mainly to screen out the house above. I’ve also stored a stack of wood from cut-down trees near the top of this area.
At the left end of the back bank, I’ve planted four small trees (American dogwood, serviceberry, crape myrtle, and heptacodium) so that the bank will eventually become partly shaded.
I then edged the top of the bank in blue hollies, planted the midsection with ‘Grey Owl’ junipers and pink spireas, and lined the bottom with catmint. The goal is bank coverage with low-care plants so I minimize weeding and mulching in the future.
To make the bank accessible (and interesting for the grandkids), I left room across the top for the above path. A deer fence marks the back boundary line (keeping deer out of the back yard), while the plantings near the top marks the other side of the path. I put a bench up there, too, behind the logs.
One last thing I did was salvage a couple of wooden fence sections to use as a screening for the lower middle of the bank. Rather than yank everything there, I figured that at least in the short run I could hide it with about 16 feet of solid fencing.
I painted the brown wooden fencing white, left a four-foot-wide section in the middle open for a trellis (now planted with a native honeysuckle vine), and planted the front of the fence with ‘Midnight Marvel’ hibiscus, ‘American Gold Rush’ black-eyed susans, and a few other warm-colored perennials and bulbs.
My wife helped me with some of this work (especially the playhouse and conifer-garden projects), and my son helped me one day dig a few of the fence-post holes. Otherwise, it’s been a one-geezer effort.
I did have a little additional help from the above guy, too, who mainly liked dealing with the sticks.