Occasionally it is fun to take pictures of what has gone horribly wrong in landscapes. These pictures are from a walk a couple weeks ago. It is far easier in my community to find pictures of blunders than to find a unique, good looking garden. All of these pictures happened in a two block radius.

So here, are the my top five landscape blunders where I live, with a few extra bonuses thrown in.

1) Pruning
I have no idea why everybody hedges everything. If you are buying pruning equipment, it is far more beneficial to buy a pair of loppers than hedging shears, and actually learn how to prune a shrub. It is far less work. This pictures is an especially bad example.

2) Weed Trees
We have a lot of trees. The maples, london plane trees, fruit trees, are all nice. But there is huge prevelance of siberian elms, tree of heaven, and seedling locust. These trees are weeds. This picture is not especially good, but it is common to fine a back empty space covered in weedy trees. My current home has a Siberian Elm, my last had tree of heaven.

3) Lack of Mulch
Bare soil surrounds flowers, and then up comes the weeds. Or it is just bare soil, like this picture, which is not especially lovely. What happened to using a good organic mulch? Wood chips, leaf mulch, pine needles, compost, anything. It will keep the weeds down, and make the place look much better.

4)Weeds
I think foxtail barley is in heaven here. I am pretty sure it thrives in the irrigation water. It was a battle to fight with it in my garden, but if it is continually allowed to go to seed, it will always be a problem.

5)Landscape Fabric
It will just look awful in a few years. And it doesn’t necessarily keep down the weeds.

Bonuses:

Cement tree ring: No idea why these exsist. In a few years they always look like this. A tree needs far more room than a two foot circle anyway.

Chainsawed trees: This is not how you prune trees.