When we first saw the house, the front rose bush was untamed and quite large. My first thought may have been “That bush has to go.” You can see in the picture below that it is nearly as tall as Michael and extremely wide.
But then we heard a bit more from Missy about the rose bush during the showing and during closing. Apparently it has been there for 50 years! Her mother lovingly tended to it each weekend and even when it wasn’t so well looked after, it thrived. Missy’s brother (let’s call him Johnny), who was also at closing, talked about the little scrappy one next to the big one, which was the rose bush he took care of when he was growing up. Missy was quite generous in saying during closing that it was our house now and we could do whatever we wanted with the yard and the bush. But in the end, we really couldn’t bring ourselves to take out something that had been part of the yard for so long!
We did decide however to give this guy a big haircut back in March since it was eating up a lot of our tiny front yard space! My Dad visited the following week too and gave it another big trim.
Roses in the Spring
Here are some pictures of the rose bush from earlier this Spring. We finally learned that the big rose bush has white flowers.
We are having a hard time coaxing the big rose bush to be more bush-like. It still rebelliously branches out in all directions; it’s a work in progress.
Johnny’s Rose Bush above has pink flowers. Thankfully it looks more like a bush.
And then to our surprise, we had a new addition in the Spring, when this red rose just sprouted up one day! Our yard is apparently very rose friendly.
Treebox Makeover!!!
Who doesn’t love a makeover? I know I do!! Well the treebox is technically not part of our property and is under the care of the DC government. But DC does allow the adjoining property owners to take care of the treebox if they choose to, within certain design constraints. This is good for everyone involved since it improves the curb appeal for the property owners and means less maintenance for the government.
When we first moved in, our treebox was a big ol’ mound of dirt with an old tree stump in the middle of it. It was an eyesore and we had planned to deal with it when we put sod down in the front yard in the fall.
Randomly, about a month after we moved in, we walked outside and there was a little fledging tree in our treebox! Apparently the DC government had decided to plant a sweetgum sapling in our treebox. Weirdly, they did not plant a sweetgum tree in our neighbor’s treebox which was also empty. You can kind of make out our tiny sweetgum against the giant tree across the street, in the picture below:
Well, we didn’t get very far into Spring before the rest of the treebox became overgrown with weeds. The picture above does not do it justice; the weeds came up to my knees! It was like a mini jungle and looked terrible. Since we can’t really do anything with our front yard until the fall, in May we decided to spruce up the treebox to improve our curb appeal.
The picture below was taken after we pulled out all the weeds and Mike wrestled the tree stump from the dirt, no easy
feat:
Next we spread around some fertile mulch:
Planted some vincas:
Tada!
Adding a fence
After all that work, we wanted to deter any dogs from our treebox. Getting a custom fence made is pricey so for the time being (or maybe forever…) we installed this steel garden fence which comes in sections that you can latch together. It was only about $100 from Lowe’s and doesn’t look too shabby!
If you look really closely, you can see that it’s not totttallly flush, but it’s good enough for now.
And it matches the clean and simple look of our house fence! You can see that after about a month we still have some
work to do to maintain the treebox - weeds are sprouting up despite the mulch. Perhaps we need more mulch? The
vincas have filled in fairly well though. Hopefully they will provide even more ground cover over time.
