Yard & Garden: Landscapes need TLC

Your landscape is very much like your home's interior dcor.

It grows old, sometimes tattered and torn, and needs updating from time to time. Sometimes, plantings need to be completely torn out and totally replaced.

Our landscape is eight years old, and annually we make changes taking out stuff that fails to suit our likes or needs or just doesn't thrive the way we expect it to.

Occasionally, we remove an entire bed, like we did this spring. A simplistic planting of dwarf English boxwoods now replaces winter-weary dwarf gardenias.

The new look follows my gardening motto: You grow or you go.

I also want plants to behave or they go. Within the last two years, we removed all rose bushes because the thorns were just too much for my skin. We also took out many ornamental grasses because the annual pruning was more than we wanted to do. Retired, my husband Ken and I have many interests to claim our time, and while gardening is one of them, we don't let the yard consume our lives. After eight years, we have finally fine-tuned it.

Professional pointers

In landscape design classes at Christopher Newport University, I learned a landscape lasts for 10-15 years before it needs at least a partial redo.

Local landscape designers agree.

"When I started my business 21 years ago there was a housing boom in Williamsburg and the bulk of my business was landscapes for new construction," said Peggy Krapf of Heart's Ease Landscape & Garden Design (www.HeartsEaseLandscape.com).

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Yard & Garden: Landscapes need TLC