Over many years I have tried to get some rough and tough plants to take in the untended common area next to our driveway. A quarter pound of blanketflower seeds, not a single plant came up. Various specimen grasses, all gone. A couple Russian sages and Apache plumes are alive but no bigger than they were 8 years ago. Tough shrubs like winterfat, gone.
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| This wants to be a dry "meadow", unplanted |
There were others I lost track of. I spread compost and wood chip mulch. I watered deeply as often as I could from the hose stretched out through the gate and across the driveway. I trimmed gawky white sweet clover and cut back Maximillian sunflowers in the years they came up.
Despite all my tending and planting, the field is what it wants to be with rangy odd grasses that survive and a chamisa that is growing. Messy. When it's dry it goes brown and dormant, almost flat dust out there.
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| Messy brown |
This summer three of the five Gambel oaks I spent good money on and planted carefully and have tended and watered faithfully have given up. Two are still green but tiny. The nicest and tallest one is crisp and brown for the first time this summer. It had done better than the others but not now.
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| Five oaks: Two Gambel oak survivors - top row. Three gave up - bottom row |
Of all the things I could have planted, these oaks were supposed to be tough, need little care after initial watering and would grow untended, loving the sun and little water.
I have no plans to do anything else out there. It will be a brown dry open patch. There is one other plant -- a tall New Mexico privet that was good sized when I planted it last year. It seems okay. It was gifted from the grounds committee when I resigned.
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| Four of the little oaks in fall, 2021 |
But other than that (so far) little else is to show after years of trying. There will be no Gambel oak grove. In good years the plot looks meadowy and unkempt but nice. In dry years it's ugly and brown.
It is what it wants to be. It is what it actually only can be.