What a Difference a Day Makes, or Three or So

This is the property, aside from the owner's residence, which has the little blue-gray house, but this is not about the little blue-gray house which is on the back side of the property.

This is about the streetside bed on the front of the property. It pretty much looks like a wild forest that happened to show up (over many years) in someone's front yard.

You may think this looks somewhat attractive compared to the after-photo. Yeah, okay, for now. Wait 'til next spring.

Here was the plan, simplified:

Remove unwanted growth and death (plenty of that).
Remove smaller trees and those which have no healthy future or aesthetic value.
Remove as many vines as feasible and/or cut back to the ground.
Raise the canopies of remaining trees to allow for the planted (many, many years ago) shrubs to have a chance and serve as the lower screen.

There were sizable dead branches which had killed or were preventing shrub growth, and vines which were guilty of same or were adversely affecting their growth habit. In fact, an overwhelming amount of foliage your see in the photo is not from the trees and shrubs. Yep, it's vine.

There were azaleas and dwarf azaleas, nandina, fatsia and some other shrubs hidden in this collage of whatever. Many had died, and the the azaleas which were being held to roughly two feet high by everyone else who decided to live in here had already come up to about four feet with a potential of roughly six feet.

I literally had to crawl through here in some places when I was scoping out this project.

One can actually walk through here now. And, look at the sunlight now getting through.

We couldn't remove every vine which had wrapped itself around upper branches without doing some serious damage, but they are dead now and eventually their leaves will fall and make room for other, intended, new ones.

With some periodic ground maintenance, occasional pruning and a little time this should actually look like a plant bed with shrubs responding and the trees beginning to show more of their own foliage.

These two palmetto trees received some attention.

Besides making the use of the driveway a somewhat dicey venture, they simply didn't have the appeal we expect from our state tree.

Actually, this is not our state tree. That would be a sabal palmetto (cabbage palm). These are pindo palms and I sometimes prefer them for their frond leaves and how more uniform the frond structure is.

Below is the result of the pruning.

You may notice the debris pile to the rear of the right palm. This was the result of all our work and it virtually ran the distance of the front of the property at about four feet tall and deep.

Sorry we have no updates for the little blue-gray house, but the owners assured me our next project will be to expose the right side of the small structure which was once hidden.

Who knows what we'll find.