Brand New Gardens

When I was a kid growing up in Los Gatos, I still remember moving into our first brand new tract house. Stark and bare, my parents planted flowering cherry trees and roses in the sun-drenched front yard, with fuchsias and ferns going into the shady backyard. They designed where the lawn would go, along with the garden beds.

Today, few home buyers have the luxury of starting from the ground up. Heck, with housing prices what they are, you're not paying too mush attention to the type of garden your potential house has. Most of us buy houses with existing gardens, and we have to live with what former owners planted.

I remember the first home I purchased. It had a huge 40-foot tall fruitless mulberry dominating the front yard. If you're not familiar with fruitless mulberry trees, they are dog-gone messy with these little seed pods dropping along with their huge leaves. The first garden task I was involved in was cutting down that tree. A friend and I rented a chainsaw and went about playing lumberjack. We had it all planned out: how to cut the trunk and where the tree would fall. Well, to make a long story short, the tree ended up coming down in the exact opposite direction in which we had planned. That darn fruitless mulberry pretty near took out our garage!

It's perfectly understandable if your initial response as a new homeowner is to scrape everything down to bare earth and start over from scratch just the way you want it. But speaking from experience, heed this advice: proceed with caution.

This is especially true when it comes to trees. And I'm not writing this warning about trees just because that first tree I cut down nearly did in the garage. Trees really do establish the foundation of a garden. New gardens with little twigs as 5-gallon trees will take years to grow into anything substantial. Unless you want to pay hundreds of dollars for a boxed tree from a specimen nursery, be careful about haphazardly cutting down trees. That huge fruitless mulberry, despite it's faults, would have provided some welcome shade in the summer. It would have been better to have simply pruned and shaped that tree and kept it - at least until a replacement would have grown to a satisfactory size.

Even if you're not sure about a particular tree or plant, give it a little time to grow on you. You may grow to love it or, at the very least, be able to put up with it. One trick that I still use is to buy small specimens at the nursery in one-gallon cans. I then transplant them into 5-gallon cans

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