Plants

The main reason for contracting out to Jane Coombs for a landscape design was that I knew little to nothing about what plants would survive under the thick canopy of the Douglas Fir trees that I planted in 1996. After failing at few plantings in the past, or at least not satisfied with how it looked after a year or two, I thought the investment would be worth it.

I used Jane's list of plant names (in Latin) and with the help of the Google, I tracked down a nursery that carried the bulk of the plants - Forest Farm and they were in my same state. Unfortunately, I was at the north part of the state, and they were way south, so I had to have them shipped.

Depsite being in boxes, they turned out to be in very good shape.

Here are most of the plants. After I ordered and shipped 'Polystichum polyblepharum', I felt pretty silly finding out that it is a common fern which are like weeds out here. But I my intention was to stick to Jane's design.

Jane was insistent on a great big pot outside the dining room.

It took me about 8 hours to get most of the plants in. The next day I had little desire to plant the remaining few.

This Carex M. (ice dance grass) is going to look great under landscape lighting.

Peeler Poles

For an added feature of the hardscape, the landscape designer included "peeler poles" to the edges of a couple of mounds. It's basically ranch fence posts that comes in several different diameters and placed at random heights. With the various berms in the landscape, it helps keep the dirt off of the trees and house.

Though the heights of the poles are to be random, that doesn't stop this anal retentive guy from organizing out pre-determined cut lengths. Yes, that's an iPad. I forgot to print out. Another testament to Apple - the iPad cleaned up from the sawdusting nicely.

Having the different diameter poles organized by length really helped to pull quickly as the poles were placed based on the drawing layout I created seen below.

Done on AutoCAD, this helped in determining placement as well as quantity to buy.

And the first pole is placed. The trench is roughly 12" deep except where there are roots. I added an inch of Quikrete dry to the base, then added the poles, and filled up with more Fast setting Quikrete which was dry. This allowed me to manipulate and straighten the poles as I worked. Once they were set, I'd add water to the Quikrete. Worked great.