Actually, I’ll blame most of this on one particular ancestor, my great-grandmother Juliet. She apparently liked her schemes, including planting mulberries so she could try to grow silkworms (didn’t work). One of the more common summer activities around here is seeing how many times we have to kill a mulberry before it stays dead (a lot).
Grandma Juliet also decided to have terraces built in the front yard. That was a very good idea, considering the slope. I’m not a fan, however of all the boxwood she had planted on top of the terrace walls and in front of the front porch. The problem is that when they planted the boxwood, they didn’t think about how big they were going to be in a hundred years, which is entirely understandable. However, the front of the house is pretty much completely hidden by our forest of huge boxwoods. And there’s really no going back to a small size after all this time.
What I’d really like to do with the boxwood is move them so that they’re in front of the terrace walls instead of on top of them. And then I’d probably turn a good part of the terrace into a garden. But I’m not allowed to touch the boxwood because they’re a hundred years old and they’ll die if I move them. Because plants are irreplaceable. *eyeroll*
Anyway, the real reason why I started this topic is because I’ve been pulling English Ivy from underneath the boxwood (ok, these are boxwood that my mom planted, but the same issues apply, just make them 25 years old). And there’s still a lot of English Ivy all over all the gardens. I’m sure that Grandma Juliet planted it because it’s English! and ivy is the epitome of English elegance and she was going to make her farm house just as elegant as any English manor! I will admit that ivy is pretty and lush and if it wasn’t invasive and didn’t have suckers that destroy brick, I’d have no problem with it. Well, no problem other than removing it and having to breathe in all the dust that completely destroys my throat and might actually be an allergic reaction.
So in conclusion, I hate English ivy. It’s evil.
So is mint. But at least mint is tasty.