Something there is that doesn’t love a wall

And the something is us (and our neighbors) when the wall is made out of burly, thick, ugly, overgrown hedges. So on the 4th of July, I got all Robert/Frost/Ronald Reagan/Mikhail Gorbachev yesterday and decided to “tear down this wall.”

We had been planning on removing them for quite awhile, but I hadn’t yet had the energy to tackle a new project. But after wrapping up the bulk of the front porch work (more on that later), I was ready to make a dent. Yesterday was the easy part: taking the sawsall to the base of all the hedges and cutting them down at the roots and piling them up in the yard. (Wait, that was easy?) The hard part will be digging up and removing all of what lies beneath the ground: root balls and tendrils going deep into the ground. Yikes.

Our terrific neighbors to the north of us were excited to hear we were going to take these things down. Apparently, they hate them just as much as we do. We’re going to have our raised bed garden, small fence and trellis standing in their place (one day…one day!) as a nice border between our yards.

When cutting them down yesterday, I discovered an old fence inside the growth. It had been there so long that in places, the hedge had actually grown around pieces of the fence so that the wire fencing ran through branches and the trunks had encased the fencing. I’ve got to check with the matriarch next door, but her daughter told me that we could take the fence down too (which I think may be on their property — it’s hard to tell.)

Check out the enormous pile of hedges I’ve got to cut into pieces and take to the dump soon. It’s gotta be about 8 feet tall. And there are still more to cut down on the south side and in the back.

And here’s a nice before/after from the roof and then from our 2nd floor windows.

I can’t describe how much bigger this makes our yard feel — like our yard just magically got 30% bigger.