The strip of lawn down the right side of our house is narrow – only about eight feet between the wall and the privacy fence. It is home to the air conditioning units (around which I array various garden supplies) as well as the brick-built compost bins and a plastic shed, so it has a decidedly utilitarian air. It serves as my main station for chipping up garden waste (because of the proximity to the compost bins), so there's generally some debris strewn about. Mowing is very difficult around the concrete pad supporting the AC units, so it's also usually overgrown with lush tall grass – all in all, it's better not to talk about that part of the garden too much. From aforementioned shed backwards toward the back fence, the lawn area becomes a little wider, before opening up to the backyard. This area is a little more usable for gardening, so here the fence has a continuous garden border as its companion. The stretch alongside the house started out as a narrow strip of nursery area where I used to grow on seedlings that prefer a bit more shade (with sun-loving seedlings going into the nursery areas in the left fence border). As I spent more time gardening here, I learned that this is also the drainage superhighway for the right side of the house, so despite my attempts to build up the soil level and add sand for better drainage, these nursery areas still got too wet for many plants to thrive. As a result of that combined with perhaps too little sunshine, I was never very successful at keeping seedlings alive here, so over time this strip has become inhabited with plants that arrived on a temporary basis, but wound up staying more or less permanently – like the thryallis and duranta shrubs that arrived as small seedlings or offsets, and the proliferation of ruellia that seems to like it there. Despite it's current status, I still think of this strip as the right fence nursery area, though The nursery areas terminate about where the strip opens up to the backyard, where a jujube tree and an unruly patch of thornless blackberry dominate the picture. The border continues with mixed shrub and perennial plantings, up to the point where the rigth fence meets up with the back fence, at a corner where a live oak reigns supreme. At that point, the border seemlessly blends into the back fence border. For the purpose of keeping track of what lives where, everything planted to the right of our rock garden is assigned to the right fence border (yes, I'm very serious about my garden organization, even if Amy wishes I were more serious about managing its inhabitants). So in all, the right fence border isn't the most exciting part of the garden, but it completes the picture, and has some interesting plants (a list of which you'll find below). Currently growing in our right fence border
Last modified:
April 26, 2025 |
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