The Adirondack Garden: Chinese Privet

The Adirondack Garden: Virginia Creeper

Following the final phase of construction and cleanup of the site on our Adirondack house, we began to add landscaping, thinking, naively, that we would not have to do much since we were surrounded by beautiful forest and mature trees.  We were so wrong.  First, we had to remove several major trees that died as a result of the trauma of the construction.  We tried to remove as few trees as possible and only on the immediate footprint of the house, but there were inevitable casualties.  Those had to be taken down, cut and removed or split for firewood.  For tree care, we use Tetreault Tree Works in Old Forge. Pierre Tetreault is reliable and can climb almost any tree to prune it. The second project, or really an ongoing project was pruning.  I did a tremendous amount of it myself but then called Pierre to do the higher and more dangerous work.  The Virginia creeper was planted four years ago in order to create a cover for a large retaining wall, and it worked pretty well.  It likes a lot of sun so was more abundant on the sunny sides of the wall, but the deer like to eat the leaves.  So we have been battling the deer to protect it.  It is very hardy and comes back with energy and renewed spirit every year, with a better and bigger root system, so we are hopeful that it will continue to flourish and spread as long as we can keep the deer at bay.

The Adirondack Garden: Creeping Phlox

The Adirondack Garden: River Birches

Among the many challenges of creating your own Adirondack sanctuary is landscaping and gardening in a very short season in less-than-hospitable Zone 3.  On the one hand, it seems superfluous to be adding to an already awesome natural landscape, and we tried to keep as many trees as possible in building our house. But there is also a desire to add to what we have, to build a living legacy that can grow and develop over decades and beyond.  This is the first in a series of posts I will do documenting our fledgling Adirondack garden. This is a river birch planted in a wet area near one of our two bays.  It has done remarkably well.  Here it was just planted and is probably a few years old.  It is now four years later and the tree has flourished.  These trees seem to need lots of water, lots of sun and space to spread out.