PUSHING THE BORDERS

A few shots of almost finished planting for this new garden design that has followed the Hispano/Latino model of creating an oasis behind walls at the street, adapted through the lense of contemporary suburban California landscape design. The client brief was privacy, security, beauty, interesting mix of plantings, a water feature, a usable patio for entertaining and an easily negotiated access walk to descend the slope easily for aging parents when they visit. Here’s the almost finished results.

Neat to see it before it all fills in. How do you keep weed seedlings out before it fills in? Here in southern Japan any open soil is almost instantaneously infested with all manner of weed and grass seedlings, especially during the warm, rainy months.

Pretty as always, David. You just can't do this kind of garden here - too many eucalypts, too many leaves and sticks blowing around, and - like in Japan - too many lush green winter weeds that grow 4 feet high.

My philosophy is that no bare ground means less weeds, but it also helps that this is all fresh new layer of topsoil. So far, the only weeds have been the ubiquitous Oxalis corniculata, fortunately no Oxalis pes-caprae to deal with in this particular garden.

I've had that yellow oxalis out the front on the verge since I bought this place...have slowly been killing it off, and have a pile of mulch to chuck over it this year. As much as we desperately need the rain, I find I get frightened of winter these days because it means endless oxalis, wild oats, euphorbias and a bloody malvus that got into the back yard and took off. Everything goes so green here in the winter, but a lot of it is oxalis and oats and very temporary - I hate it.