It’s a Garden, Not a Stage

September 30th, 2014

Most people like a little privacy in the yard, which is why arborvitae and fences are such popular landscape décor.

These gardens feel like they’re on a stage of an amphitheater.

But even that wasn’t going to solve the challenge at my daughter’s second-floor “flat” in the Netherlands.

Erin got a job in Amsterdam and just moved into a 5-story complex that curves around a city block. The back has a courtyard with the lots divided into small, pie-shaped spaces.

Erin is fortunate enough to own one of these prized outdoor spaces.

The problem is that anybody can look out their back door and watch what’s going on below.

It’s more like an amphitheater than a series of courtyard spaces.

My job, as the imported garden guy/dad, was to re-do Erin’s space into something more usable and less stage-like.

The inherited “garden” was no Dutch treat. It was a Dutch mess.

Ivy and weeds had overgrown a good bit of the space.

A spindly butterfly bush was growing out of the middle of a back raised patio where a concrete slab had been removed.

A 4-foot-tall version of persicaria – a popular Dutch groundcover – was flopping all over through about a quarter of the space.

Another tall, pink-blooming 4-footer – a type of reseeding impatiens on steroids – was poking up randomly.

And a half-dead redbud tree was growing up about 20 feet near the middle of the space.

The first order of business in any inherited re-do is to figure out what you don’t like about the current situation and then to think about how you’d rather use it. Form follows function, in other words.

In this case, Erin wanted the lot de-cluttered so she could just walk the path to the back patio. She also wanted something nice to look at from above as well as in the garden, preferably with bright colors of red, gold, orange, yellow and burgundy (no frou-frou pink, baby blue or lavender).

She wanted some space for her rather hefty dog, Boon, to dig and “do business,” a few tea herbs, and ideally, a hammock.

Above all, she wanted as much privacy as possible while living in an Amsterdam fishbowl.

What would you do? I’ll wait while you mull.

OK, here’s what I came up with…

The first step was to clear out everything that was cluttering the look or not appropriate for a small garden with bright colors.

Erin’s yard before getting started.

My crew (amounting to my wife, Sue, since Erin had to work) and I yanked the weeds, the rampantly seeded impatiens and that butterfly bush growing out of the patio.

We cut back the ivy, pruned a neglected viburnum, and “skinnied” the out-of-control persicaria to a small ring of it around the redbud.

Then we moved a few “keeper” plants to better locations, such as two irises to a sunny spot along the neighbor’s fence and several yellow-eyed Japanese anemones to a shady spot along the opposite neighbor’s ivy-covered fence.

With the coast clear, we turned to the hardscape improvements.

I re-set the wobbly slab patio and moved some slabs to fill in the hole where the space-interrupting butterfly bush had been.

I was going to level out the raised patio, but a retired Dutch resident on the third floor (actually more of a daylong spectator) yelled down that it was raised because there was water underneath.

I had no idea what he was saying, but another resident/spectator overheard and translated.

Erin’s yard after clearing it back.

Unlike Harrisburg, water is an ever-present issue in below-sea-level Amsterdam.

To get some privacy from above, Sue and I bought five trellises and mounted them partway down the yard, up 6 feet tall on posts that we inserted into the sandy soil via sledge-hammered metal sleeves.

This was way more complicated than it sounds. First, we had to buy all of the tools in addition to the posts, sleeves and trellises.

Second, we had to do it with Dutch signage, in unfamiliar metric sizes, and in the apparent Dutch tradition of cutting your own wood with a borrowed handsaw on sawhorses along the street outside the store.

Toughest of all was the Amsterdam style of acquiring building supplies. In the U.S., we hop in the car, zip to Lowe’s or Home Depot, and have everything in the trunk and back home in an hour.

In Amsterdam, they do everything on foot or by bike – including hauling appliances in boxes strapped to their bike’s handle bars.

We spent a good half day finding and hauling our supplies four blocks, pushing a big cart over the rough streets while dodging bikers, scooters and trucks parked on the sidewalk. It didn’t help that two bags of stone and two lumber posts dropped off the cart into the intersection along the way.

After sidestepping sledge-hammering a metal sleeve into a buried water pipe, we got the trellises up and ready for Sue to stain. At least that part was easier than here at home. The sleeves went into the sandy Dutch soil with far less effort than hammering and digging through our shale and clay.

Erin’s yard after the trellises are installed.

We staggered the trellises for effect and mounted one of them sideways atop a border fence to give 2 extra feet of screening there.

Next, Erin took us on a tram to a rather large garden center called Osdorp to pick out plants.

Interesting place. It had everything for the yard and garden – including lumber, patio furniture, tools, grills, yard art, water garden supplies and way more, plus a nice café and free bathroom use. (Most public-place restrooms charge you 50 cents in the Dutch pay-to-pee system.)

Osdorp had the size, feel and layout of an IKEA store, if you’ve ever been to one of those. It’s like a gardening IKEA.

Odd thing, though. All of the plants were displayed indoors, including the shrubs and perennials. It must have something to do with the often atrocious Dutch weather.

We bought and planted sweet woodruff, a shady groundcover with dainty white flowers, to edge the patio.

Erin liked a pair of golden sedge grasses (Carex oshimensis ‘Evergold’) to flank the entry to the patio.

Orange crocosmia, a burgundy-blooming euphorbia and a triangle of good old American blackeyed susans went in for perennial color.

Inside the Osdorp garden center in Amsterdam.

And for the trellises, we picked Boston ivy for one (bright red fall foliage), a tangerine-blooming honeysuckle for another, and an evergreen white-blooming Clematis armandii for the horizontal trellis. (The Dutch can do this clematis because they don’t get as cold in winter as we do, due to the Atlantic Ocean currents.)

That half-dead redbud? We were going to pay to cut it down but decided to keep the trunk and several lower limbs for two reasons:

1.) The trunk will serve as one of the fastening points for Erin’s hammock. The brick wall at the back of the patio will be the other.

2.) We plan to install plastic wire between the top of the trellises and the redbud branch stubs so the Boston ivy and honeysuckle will grow up, ultimately making a living tent to screen the patio from the upper-level audience.

For the wish-list herbs, we got two hanging window boxes for the balcony and planted them with lavender and assorted mints.

The last job was adding some instant color via 3 dozen yellow pansies. These should bloom right through the Amsterdam winter.

And I planted 200 tulip bulbs so things will look colorful and “Dutchy” right off the bat next spring.

Erin’s job is to finish off the planting next May with some butterscotch-colored coralbells ‘Caramel,’ a Mellow Yellow® spirea, a mass of dahlias (her favorite), climbing nasturtium and blackeyed susan vines for the remaining two trellises, and assorted annuals for sidewalk edging and in three pots on the patio.

Boon got his own “digging pit” in space under the steps down where I removed slabs for the patio job.

Everybody’s happy. Sue and I are tired. And the Dutch guy on the third floor gave us a thumbs-up.