Trampled

In my last post I told you we took out the Spanish broom in the back yard, but that isn't all we are doing. Now that the big shrub is gone, this is what is going on in the spot where it was:

We're having full in-ground irrigation installed in the whole yard, front and back. It's major. Trenches are being dug all over, rock swales disturbed, gravel mounded up, instructions shouted in Spanish. 

They are even digging under the front sidewalk to lay the tubing.

As careful and neat as the guys are being, it's a mess, and my garden plants are being trampled to death. Some smaller new things have simply been dug up where the trenches had to go. The point is to get the tubing where the plants are, so there's no escaping that they are being disturbed to do that. I close my eyes and don't look.

A patch of small plumbago cuttings are gone now -- they were so small I can understand the men not even seeing them. I'll replant more. All of my tulips along the garage wall have been dug up. They didn't realize there were bulbs buried behind the sumacs and up against the wall, and a trench had to go there. 

I'd been debating taking the tulips out anyway or maybe replanting other colors or mixing in allium bulbs. Now I know I'll need to completely re-do the strip and that's fine. This irrigation work needs to be done and any area can be replanted.

After several seasons gardening here, I now realize I need a full in-ground system, more than the self-installed tubing I had laid down that had to be hooked up to garden hoses and snaked across the kitchen doorstep. Even the botanical garden, which features southwest native plants grown in natural settings, has irrigation. You simply cannot grow anything here without it.

So a real system is being installed, and my plants (and checkbook) are being trampled in the process. I know that a warming, drying climate is upon us, and in the very end even this will not be enough. I probably shouldn't be doing this at all. 

But given that I want a garden and enjoy untold pleasures from having one, this is necessary. And once I committed to the project, I decided to have some moss rock edging installed and a new garden space filled with soil for future planting.

And while the crew are here they will take out an old overgrown bed of irises by the fence and expand the garden under the aspens by about two feet, and install moss rock edging there too, and . . . 

. . . . with the ability to water things now, it was hard to know where to stop.