Eight is Not Enough - Get The Whole Flat

If you think decorating is hard, landscaping is harder. It's like decorating with biology. How many Ralph Lauren paint chips did you have to go through before you selected that nice Soho Loft Buff for your living room walls, with Toulumme accents in satin finish? Imagine if you first had to send a wall sample off to your local county extension for testing, then determine if your color palette was compatible with the wall's Ph. Then you had to ensure the wall was receiving a suitable amount of sunlight or it would quickly fade to Country Kitchen Powder Blue, which, while bad enough, when paired with a Toulumme accent might give off bacterial toxins. Then it turns out your wall requires an hour of work each day to keep it looking good. And just when you thought you had it right, you wake up one spring morning to discover your living room is stripped down to the bare drywall. Soho Loft is an ANNUAL? Doh!

There isn't enough feng-shui in the world to save your butt in that situation. Better just call Martha Stewart and have her send over a botanist. With samples.

When landscaping is done right, it REALLY looks good - prudent use of clustering, contrast, staggered bloom timing, layering and hedges (as in, mutual funds - you're gonna have to call your broker if you're thinking of doing any serious landscaping).

But landscaping is rarely done right, because it's usually done by economically- and phylogenically-challenged homeowners like the Headmaster. Most DIY landscaping falls into two main categories. The first is what the Headmaster calls Smurf Gardening, where each spring the homeowner travels to Home Depot to purchase some weed whacker string and returns with a half-dozen plants (celosia, dusty miller and marigolds are favorites) which are placed randomly around an entryway or at the base of a large tree. Sometimes a gazing ball is installed to enhance the viewing experience.



The solution to this is simple clustering. Never purchase less than a dozen of any annual flowering plant. In fact, go crazy and just get the flat. They don't reproduce, so what you buy is what you get. Unlike perennials, which WILL reproduce and therefore a single plant can propagate itself to create a cluster after a few years. So to recap - it's all about clustering. Well, adding a sexy smurfette won't hurt either.





The second category is more of a Covert Operation, where the only conceivable purpose of the landscaping is to obscure whatever is going on inside the house. Let's say your hobby is putting on some white leg warmers and acting out your favorite episodes of Eight Is Enough. Stapling the J.C. Penney curtains tightly together isn't fool-proof, so you'll want to plant some Taxus Yew right up against the house and just let it go. Or if you want to get fancy try Rhododendron, but we recommend laying low until it has time to get all "leggy".

There are variations to these methods. Here are some of the most common...


The White Flag
Don't even get the Headmaster going about Leyland Cypress. With few exceptions, they're basically the landscaping equivalent of sweatpants - you plant a row of these and you're telling the world "I gave up, don't bother me". The only thing worse than planting rows of Leyland Cypress is planting them around a gargantuan Pinezilla. And here's the real trouble with Leyland Cypress - eventually a stiff breeze will come in and blow a few of them over. And then what have you got? Male-pattern Cypress. Better break out the sweat pants.


PINEZILLA
If trees had traveling sideshows, this pine tree would get top billing. Here, the homeowner appears to have grown a freakshow goldmine, combining The Gentle Giant with The Three-Legged Boy. The only thing worse than having a Pinezilla in your yard is framing it with rows of Leyland Cypress - like little sideshow barkers. "Ladies and Gentlemen, step right this way..."



Christmas in April
Here, you plant only azaleas - bunches and bunches of azaleas. For one glorious week in April you have the best-decorated house on the block. The only thing that could possibly be better is if you could hook them up to a solid-state relay and get them to blink to the tune of "June Is Bustin Out All Over". But then, suddenly it all just shuts down and goes brown overnight. You leave the decorations up all year anyway.

The QVC
This homeowner purchased "Wildflower Garden In A Can". Actually, he purchased a signature-series George Foreman Grill, which came with "Wildflower Garden In A Can". He spent a total of three and a half minutes designing and planting his flower bed, and then simply followed the directions on the can: "open and sprinkle the seeds around liberally". Because the flowers weren't compatible with his USDA Zone, most died. For those that survived, he had a difficult time differentiating weeds from flowers. But then they sprouted just enough flower-like seed pods to keep him satisfied. Now he thinks he's got a genuine wildflower bed, when in fact it is simply an exceptional collection of annual grassy weeds mixed with invasive yarrows. HEY DUDE! If you were shopping for a pet and QVC threw in "Wild Monkeys In A Can", would you open it?! The Academy has no sympathy for you.

The Monolith
Originally inspired by famous architect Tom Brady and his firm "The Brady Bunch, AIA", this technique requires an artistic eye. It also requires a great deal of patience - a sweater vest will help. Basically you plant rows of hedges along the perimeter of the house, wait ten years then trim them into all sorts of fantastical and whimsical shapes, like rectangles, circles and um... well that's pretty much it. It helps if you remove the front entrance to your home so there is nothing to break up the monotony.



The Squatter
Shoot, uh cain't cut 'er down, she's just always been thar." You have no idea how that big ugly conifer got into your front lawn, it's just always been there. So you mow around it. This look is greatly enhanced when you can grow a bunch of weeds around the bush, and then start cutting around the weeds, so the whole thing begins to look like some sort of boreal biome. This method of landscaping - if you can call it that - is like standing in front of the mirror with your razor in hand, staring at a big zit. You realize you're just going to have to go around that sucker.



The Mystery Package
Ok, you don't know what the hell it is, but you're gonna leave it there just in case it's sump'n. Here, the owner hasn't really bought into it - he's still on the fence. He's hoping the telephone pole is obscuring his indecision. Better to just bite the bullet and mulch a nice big circle around that bad boy. Hell, put a low-voltage spotlight on it. When you're loud and proud, being wrong just don't matter any more.















The Blob
A meteorite falls on your lawn, depositing a large green conifer-like creature. Some local teenagers witness the blob eating an off-leash poodle. They try to warn the police, but nobody believes them. Meanwhile, the blob just keeps getting bigger and bigger. This particular specimen is so large it appears to have its own address.



The Veggie
The Academy has nothing against vegetarians. They're going to save the world with all their great ideas. Ideas like planting acorn squash as ground cover for the walkway. In fact, with a simple pair of heavy-duty Wellington boots, you can convert these into "Steppables" - ground cover you can walk on. Of course, in late summer your guests will have to navigate around masses of rotting vegetation, but that's no biggie - just bring 'em in the back door! Better tell them to watch out for the Blob though. Local legend has it that it eats poodles, and your veggie friends certainly wouldn't want to see that. Plus, poodles are just so darned cute it'd be tough to resist the ensuing "Save The Poodles" campaign.


The Refuge
You can't remember who put that sign up on your property. Maybe the telephone company put it up. Maybe that weed put the sign up. Either way, you're taking no chances - that humongous weed is officially protected. The last thing you want is to be caught cutting it down by some Prius-driving veggie who plants acorn squash on his front walkway. It's a slippery slope from there to a trillion-dollar unfunded mandate.


The Double-Entendre
Ok, you know what? We're not even going there. Just trim the damn thing already.













The Academy's landscaping borrows on all these methods, but leans heavily toward the Covert Operation. Except the previous owners weren't doing anything nearly as interesting as acting out Dick Van Patten sitcoms - they simply wanted to hide the "decorating" they'd done. And by "decorating", we mean "covering every surface with McHale's Navy Battleship Gray semi-gloss". Dudes, did you get a deal at Sunny's Surplus? Seriously, EVERYTHING? When the Headmaster first moved in he had an overwhelming urge to jump overboard. In retrospect, perhaps abandoning ship might have been the better course.

Slowly the Headmaster is weeding the landscaping down to the bare essentials and then building it back up with some method to the madness. Mostly though, he wants all the new architectural features of the Academy - especially the new windows - to be exposed. When he installs a whole flat of gazing balls on the north grounds, he wants to stand proudly in the front window admiring his leg warmers.