Friday, May 18, 2007

are you weary?

keen eye b here - how ya been? it's been a while, i know. but i'm back, starry-eyed and excited about landscaping and gardening. much like keen eye e, the spring and summer take me outside where i dig in the dirt and worship the foliage (and shriek every time i see a spider!).

also, much like keen eye e, i've recently begun to rework my own plot of land. it's smack dab in the center of my southern city, but it's not city-sized. it's an enormous swath of land. and, in true american fashion, almost every inch of the 7100 square feet is covered in grass.
s i g h .
and, in true american fashion, i roll out the gas-guzzling lawn mower every other saturday morning (i should mow every week, but i just can't bear it!), and shear the tops off each little bad of grass and curse the fool who planted them. (this is no small feat - my yard is nothing if not a miniature mountain range.)

while mowing, i dream of drought-tolerant ground covers in need of little-to-no mowing. i envision my vast expanse of land covered in mounds of fragrant, foot traffic-tolerant perennials. these dreams led me to find stepables - a company that specializes in providing just this type of solution to grass-weary gardeners.

here are a few of my favorite of their drought-tolerant offerings:

wooly thyme - lovely with its tightly matted foliage and lavender flowers.

creeping thyme (white) - looks like a light dusting of snow in the middle of summer!

lotus plenus - this is perfect as a lawn substitute, and glows with lovely orange buds and yellow double blooms! and, it's suited to clay-bound soils, like mine!

so, if you're grass-weary like me, and in the market to green up your lawn (in that environmentally conscious sense of the word), check out stepables for some garden guidance and plant therapy.

1 comment:

David Nichols said...

Yeah, creeping thyme for me. We have the grass problem. But we also seem to be just coming out of (touch wood) a long drought, so it's a period of adjustment. There are supposedly grasses very specific to our area (historically - I only know this because I have spoken to someone who works for a local government area who came and harvested our grass seeds for his landscaping activities in a place about 10 miles east, so I guess it's less unique than it was) but I don't think they're that hardy. Grass is Ok though - it's lawn that is crap. I think.