Rock & Rose
Side yard landscaping
The west side of the house has a lovely flagstone path, and at some point in time had some rose bushes to decorate the area. It had become overrun with weeds, the grass was over the flagstone, and the roses were leggy with nary a rose showing up in over a year’s time.
I thought that area between the flagstone and the wall would look better with river rock instead of dirt, moss, and weeds. I bought weedblock to put under the rocks; I’d seen rock landscapes with weeds growing through them and they look awful. Plus it would be hard to weed in between rocks. I noticed that the black fabric said ‘don’t forget the anchors’ but I figured the rocks would do the job. Who needs more plastic in the soil?
I started with the edge closest to the driveway. I cleared the soil of weeds and debris.
All the rocks were hand collected from nearby riverbeds. Yes, a ton of work, but have you seen the price of a bag of rocks? The bubble wrap pictured was to sit on, as our foam pad for such endeavors had gone missing temporarily.
When I came to the roses, I figured I’d just work around them, cutting the weed block in sections. After a discussion with my husband, we decided to get rid of the roses: they hadn’t produced and frankly were rather ugly. How to get rid of them? I looked up all kinds of videos and advice on removing roses. Most had the intention of transplanting them, and said to dig out the rootball.
So, I started digging. My husband started digging. I was as far down as an arm could reach, and had only found a huge pipe-shape root that angled downward. We’d been able to remove trees from the side of the house using some cables attached to the car; why not the rose root?
I attached steel cables to hooks on the car body and looped the other end through a branch. Every time, the branch snapped.
The root was angled the wrong direction to simply wrap around the thickets part. I went about it with a different tactic: drill through the thick root, put the NRS strap through it, and hook that to the cable.
The car pulled and pulled; this time instead of the wood snapping, the clutch started to burn out. So I gave up and we decided to cut the root.
Wasn’t as easy as it sounds. That wood was so dense, it felt like it took way too long to cut through the root.
With the roses out, I started clearing more soil after collecting more rocks. My husband thought the first section I had completed had rocks too high against the siding. So I pulled those out, dug out soil, and redid the application. For the rest of it, I also removed soil to level it out.
While digging, I found the most curious things: little green balls (b-bs?), broken glass, various plastic bits, and a “Folds of Honor” bracelet.
The other thing I found while digging were small rocks, which I set aside to add with the river rocks.
Tried to make the rock placement as arbitrary as possible, though I found flatter shaped rocks worked well to hold the fabric under the soil against the flagstone. I put the ugliest looking ones against the wall.
At this point, I just need more rocks to finish.
