Yesterday was my first day of vacation, which I celebrated by eating for breakfast a very special pink-iced sugar cookie shipped to my door from Larry's House of Cakes. To deal with the resulting sugar rush, I went for a jog around the neighborhood and met a new neighbor who was busy limbing a tree in his front yard with a chainsaw.
Not more than five minutes later, our front yard went from this:
To this:
You know when someone you know well shaves their mustache and their face looks all weird and wrong? Turns out the same thing happens when you take away ALL of the plants in your front yard.
Why would we do such a thing? Well, the plants that were there before had not been trimmed in many years and there was just no saving them. Any pruning would have left us with only wood, so we decided to wipe the slate clean.
Last weekend, we stopped in The Garden Spot, the sweetest neighborhood nursery ever, and stumbled on this shore pine:
We bought it :)
And then we had to deal with our new purchase.
Being a novice at tree planting, I gathered what tools I could and had my best buddy/landscape lifeline on speed dial. Getting up the root ball of the space's former occupant was no easy task, and we still have four more stumps to go. E thought she'd give the pick a swing.
(No houses were harmed in the taking of this picture.)
A shore pine is the same genus as a Japanese Black Pine, but a different species. This was has been well-trained already and we will have to learn a bit about maintaining it and getting it to grow in a, aesthetically-pleasing manner. We think it adds a needed vertical element to our squat little bungalow and can't wait to watch it grow.
What you can't see is that it was so cold and raining all day. It's time for an AMAZING Christmas beer from Kulshan Brewery, which happens to be a stone's throw from The Garden Spot. Keepin' it very local (except for the damn sugar cookies).
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