Landscape Archeology & Light

One of our most heroic clients has been removing a good portion of the old plants on his site that will make way for the new.  He is only the second owner (for two years) of a ranch home built in the 1950s in a quaint town about an hour west of Chicago. So, many of those plants he took out had put down roots.

The image above shows some of the removal work he did recently in his back yard where we will work on the landscape next year.  I found his comment so amusing that I quote him here:

"Attached is a photo of work on the root ball of the burning bush.  Is there a school of thought in planting that says "set your plant on a bed of rock at the bottom of the hole"?  I pulled more rock, metal and glass out of this hole than dirt. Small artifacts including spark plugs, nuts and bolts, shards of glass
are set on the wall."

I shared with him stories of the underground sidewalks we had found on jobs, one to two feet beneath grade...

So that you can finish with an image of beauty, below is a shot of his front yard the day we finished the landscape renewal.  I choose this picture because it shows the spring witch-hazel disseminating the late afternoon light like stained glass.

Since we used the existing hardscape (with only a little tweaking), I decided to shape the mulch bed under the tree in a rectangular shape to better integrate it with the path.