Yes, mulch is good. I work hard to get my mulch, and put it around my plants. But I think there's a difference between a garden and a landscape. Much time is spent in one and little in the other. A garden is much less predictable!

My garden has been fussing at me to correct what I said about it being a wild exuberance. They believe they are pretty well behaved and quite distinct from one another, NOT any sort of disordered tangle. At least that's what they think although Golden Celebration can be seen with his arm around Moonlight and Comtesse du Cayla and Mons. Tillier butt heads.
I do think that we can express our tastes without saying someone shouldn't be gardening unless they do it like we do.
The main person who bugged me about growing roses never saw my garden and made up her mind about roses being ugly way before she met me. She decided that all rose gardens have straight rows of blooms on sticks. But it's a good thing we all have our opinions, I think, most likely, or rather..I hope.
Linda

Oooh, I hate to see those murdered crape mrytles also. Red died mulch - talk about unnatural.

My biggest pet peeve right now is rabbits. I think they are doing more damage than the freeze.

The original sin that makes lousy gardens--or better, nongardens--isn't lack of time, or lack of money, or lack of skill, and certainly not lack of taste. It's lack of interest. Money doesn't have much to do with it, as poor people who live in a culture with a gardening tradition demonstrate. They have plants; they have gardens. I can understand a beginner who doesn't know any gardeners and doesn't have any money to go out to the garden center and buy plants being buffaloed for a while, but otherwise, people who want plants get them sooner or later. They get passalong plants, they grow cuttings and seeds. They may not be growing rarities, and it doesn't matter: they can have wonderful gardens, in the ground or in pots, just the same. I spend plenty on my garden, to be sure, but I have irises collected from the side of the road, sage descended from the first batch I grew from seed, dozens of roses I grew from cuttings, other roses, shrubs, succulents given to me or propagated from friends' plants, and artemisia (I think) and a species sage dug up from our land. God, I sound self-righteous. Sorry. But I do strongly believe in gardens that aren't totally dependent on money and the skills of the nursery industry, grateful though I am for them.

Melissa

My pet peeve are neighbors who give gardening advice and go on and on about their yard but actually never do anything--they hire landscapers to do everything!!

I live in a cookie cutter subdivision. I dont know if the builder did this or an uneducated home owner but MANY of the folks in my subdivision have plantings that bad news. Typically, planted RIGHT in front of the picture window or RIGHT against the foundation of the house you can see the following:

Southern Magnolia TREE (grows to 90 ft)
Chinese loropetalum (grows 6 to 15 feet)
Privet (10-12 feet)
and/or various Cedar TREES

I think they see the one gallon version and think...."oh yeah...that will go in that 18" space between the sidewalk and foundation just fine!!"

I want to take a shovel or at a minimum hedge trimmers to help them out. Its crazy!!!!!

:o)

* Foundation planting of all evergreens

* Said evergreens forced into looking like giant green meatballs or other unnatural shapes and/or severely pruned

* Foundation planting with no evergreens - c'mon up here we need *something* to look at in the winter months, and a couple of nicely naturally shaped evergreens can really perk up the place (unless, of course, they are trained to look like meatballs, in which case I'd rather not be forced to look at them), especially if artfully combined with great winter interest deciduous shrubs/trees.

* White pots. I *loathe* white plastic pots. If one wants to go the plastic route, green blends in so much better and allows to the plant in the pot to be the focus of attention.

* Too much "stuff"/clutter. I like ornamentation, but sometimes folks go overboard and it just looks messy, especially with the "cutesy" stuff, like someone above mentioned.

Those swept yards are traditional in many rural areas.

It discourages invasive grass & weeds & critters, defines paths, & adds some order to those lush plantings.

& you don't need a mower & a sprinkler system to keep them up!

Tree topping.
A front yard that is just grass.
Too many chemicals on anything.

...How about dolls...I drove by a garden a few years ago that was decorated with dolls...baby dolls...lots of them...they had been there for some time by the shape of them...it was about the most creepy thing I had ever seen...And the most horrifying thing is that I just know that inside that house was someone who was ever so very proud of his/her inventiveness...I think I actually screamed...

Sue - yikes that *is* creepy!!

I wonder what some of you'd say about my front yard? It has no less than 11 meatballs in it, one large in yew, the smaller ones in various sizes in boxwood. And at the back is my capercaillie and my husband's turkey, both in yew and other simpler topiary figures. They are not noticeable in summer when they are almost hidden by the lush growth around but they come into their own in winter, powdered with snow.

"or they think it's funny in some overeducated ironical way" This may apply to my husband who is a professor and likes garden gnomes, but in his case it is also a reaction against his childhood garden. He grew up in his grandmother's perfectly beautiful and stylish walled garden, invisible from the street. She was a garden teacher trained in Berlin in 1910 but practised her skills only in her own garden, with the help of a gardener, of course. My husband was a very lonely child, after he had let some "undesirable" children in through the back door, all children were banned. So now it is important to have an amusing garden and for both children and grown-ups to have fun in it. Our trees are both for fruit and for climbing, with ladders for the little ones, lots of soft fruit for eating from the bush and not kept for jam only, secret gardens and secret paths.

Marianne in Sweden

Marianne, I love the backstory of your gnomes! Tell your husband that's the way to do it.

I may get me a flock of plastic flamingos to rebel against my too-rich-whitebread-peer roots, the best-friend's mom who laughed at me at 7 for pronouncing potpourri wrong reading it for the first time ;]

I do tend to let cedars grow where they want to, if they seem to really WANT to :)

My friend/neighbor is my peeve with her 'you are killing this' or 'I do that [instead]'. But I do enjoy seeing her so proud of her gardens [secretly noting that she kills much more than I do]. I loved it last autukmn when she accused me again and I got to say "Ugh, not dying... FALL." Oh, my ;]

Marianne...Gardening to attract or welcome childern is delightfull...I love the little things that you can put on trees that make it look like tree faces (don't know what the trees think of them though)...and a bit of something or other poking here and there leads me to look further...to see what can be discovered...But let me tell you...20 or thirty filthy dolls in various states of disrepair and undress is something that quinton Tarintino should look deeper into...or maybe a setting for the next Chain saw massacre...
Meredith...I love your rebel flamingos...Some things you just can't say in words...but a flamingo will say it quite nicely ;)

Shrubbery shaped into balls.
Plastic flowers
No foundation plants
Planters that look like a person's head
Something too cute, needs taste

Carla

Sue, bwahaha!:

"Some things you just can't say in words...but a flamingo will say it quite nicely"

I think I'll sew that on a pillow for Mrs Scary Snoot ;]

Some of my pet peeves aren't just aesthetic:

Lollipopping trees--makes them more susceptible to being blown down in windstorms. It's an illegal practice in Miami for that reason.

Planting invasive (or problem) exotics--Ficus trees are not supposed to be planted as trees, but can still be purchased as a patio pot plant. We had one neighbor line his driveway with a series of them. (Ignorance) Around the same time another neighbor lost a huge ficus after a couple of rainy weeks had loosened the soil. This full-grown, top-heavy, weakly-rooted monster just slowly toppled over *after* one storm. Wasn't the wind, just wet soil. The second neighbor wisely replanted with a tree that is recommended. (I feel a bit sorry for the new owners of the ficus driveway. Eventually they will have an expensive problem.)

White rock as mulch looks bad--especially when it has weeds growing in it. However it's nothing compared with cementing over the whole front yard. Not only is this plant-free landscaping, but this practice is turning flood-free streets into flood-prone ones. My city is actively discouraging people from cementing over there front lawns, but some areas have not been as proactive.

I have NEVER seen the white marble/gravel look good. But, some people think it is just what the yard needs...

Lately people are putting up these faux wishing wells and/or baskets made out of landscaping timbers....not in my yard!

Robert

Oh, something that looks really good in a yard is a dead beaver floating on the pond....guess who just shot another one BEFORE it devestated the roses...

People who don't garden and then come to my garden and point to some weeds that I missed! Or my husband pointing to some tall vegetation beside the driveway and saying I ought to mow that -- but that's blue lobelia and bidens and gerardia, with some tall grass mixed in... He's not a neat freak in the yard exactly, but unfortunately neatness and a mowed lawn is so engrained in the culture. I have to fight it too. I just want a mowed place large enough so that the bugs don't drive me crazy.

Late freezes

Deer

LOL at the dead beaver in the bond!! Put his head on a spike as a warning to the rest! We have a woman in town who dresses her flock of flamingos according to the season/month/holiday. I think they are great! Another house has nothing BUT fake flowers - all over the place! No grass, no trees or shrubs, just masses of plastic flowers! Gotta give her a vote for being different! I think 'different' (witness my cottage garden in a subdivsion of golf-course yards) takes more courage and is much more fun then 'same'

"Nothing is more unnerving to the truly conventional then the unrepentent misfit"!!

Ok...howbout the plywood cut outs shaped and painted like kids peeing on trees...

And yes on the invasive...but could be simple ignorance...My last house had a rather large field of 'german rubarb...or japanese bamboo' I really do not know its proper name and you couldent kill it with a nuclear weapon...My neighbor (the previous owner) told us his late father planted it...when he left my husband said "I am going to find that man... dig him up and smack him upside the head"....

LOL sue!!!!

"Nothing is more unnerving to the truly conventional then the unrepentent misfit"!!

Love it, Pagan. Gotta find some appropriate place to put that for certain people to see!

Peeve: Mail carriers who tromp through the flower bed between my driveway and my neighbor's driveway.
Mail carrier (looking right at Double Knock Out and a dozen Stella d'Oros): "How was I supposed to know those were flowers?"
Duh!

Kate

I'm with EmilyG about the tree topping and her other complaints. Tree topping is an awful mutilation: just imagine an atlas cedar with its crown cut off. The forum is no place for the language this practice prompts.

I'm generally unfriendly to the imitation and the fake, but I do have a weakness for topiary and pruned hedges. (Marianne, you have a friend.) The plant has to be the right one: I'd never prune a forsythia into an egg shape as I see done, for example. And my country garden's informality isn't right for strict geometrical pruning. But I've had the idea for a section of evergreen garden with a lot of pruned plants in it in the back of my head for a good while now. Perhaps I'll work it out some day.

Melissa

Before I moved to Florida, my mother used to complain about how tacky they were. She couldn't understand how people could have them in their front yards.

Well, when I moved here I told mom that after she died, I was going to plant a flock of big Pink Flamingos on her grave instead of flowers.

This caused a good laugh, and mom cheerfully agreed I could.

When Mom and Dad came to visit the first time, she brought me a gift: 2 Pink Flamingos! They are proudly stuck in the ground between Tamora and Perfect Moment. I giggle every time I see them. :)

the worst thing I've seen in our area...just north of town on a country road, some real "funny" person has planted up an old blue toilet and put it out at the end of the driveway....YUCK !!

My neighbor across the street has a cheesy-looking life-size deer on his front lawn (I think it's an archery target) lined up in a row with a bunch of rusty metal scraps of who-knows-what. Any of the metal bits alone would look kinda cool tucked into a flower bed, but they are lined up like soldiers in the middle of a sea of lawn, with the plastic deer in the middle. Wow.

Oh well - I know for a fact that at least one of my neighbors (kitty-corner from me) thinks my garden is completely over-the-top because every bit is rose garden, including the parking strips. They are more into discipline - lawn and little shrubs, and everything just so, which certainly isn't me. To each their own, right? :-)

Here is a link that might be useful: {{gwi:244588}}

Robin your garden is beautiful. Your neighbor needs to open his or her mind. :)

Robin,
That's a very inspiring garden, and your house looks lovely. Congratulations!

Melissa

My bigest pet peeve is every time a get a new plant some one in my house has to groan and say not another one. I am getting a lot of that now beacause I just riped out the lawn in the front to put in a rose garden. I only needed to order 3 cubic yards of mulch and that is about 4 in. deep in my yard. sigh

The other thing I see alot of is all those yards that look the same. Go to San Bruno and it is like one long strip of grass and they all are very neat and tidy, not a blade out of place.

A neighbor of mine put a tacky fountain of a squirrel shooting water from its mouth right smack in the front yard. Every time I pass it I wonder what possessed them to put it there.

All green yards. Nothing but a couple of trees, grass and a green moustache around the base of the house.

So many spinners, feeders, windchimes, etc. hanging in one tree that it looks like Christmas.

Patios and decks taking up 90% of the lot.

Uninspired landscaping. Here in my area, that would mean a row of red tip photinia, cherry sage and a redbud tree out front.

All potted plants and no flower beds.

Topped trees.

Butchered Crepe Myrtles.

Plastic flowers wrapped around your mailbox.

Straight narrow beds that trace the property line.

Weed blocking fabric. As far as I can tell, it does not stop weeds from coming up in my neighbor's beds and just keeps shedding little tattered pieces that end up in MY yard.

Someone who drenches their entire property with malathion whenever they spot an ant or a sowbug.

Someone who goes nuts every spring planting flowers and then lets everything die as soon as summer kicks in.

I actually think, on a country road, a blue toilet planted with flowers would be kinda cool :)

Well, peevishness is a state of mind devoutly to be avoided and yet (talk about the call of the wild--got nothing on the call to complain...hmmmm).
A cemented over yard breaks my heart.A yard full of invasives looking for a new home(I can see their hitchhiking signs--"need ride to Luanne's house will work for ride", like a Morning Glory ever did one measley chore!)Too much of that red rock, the crenellated brick edging,Shasta daisies,big masses of generic plants, gallardia, juniper etc. (I note that I complain just fine once I get started...)
Well and then there are the people who get threatened if you have a passion about anything. The pastor who came to tell me when I was planting my garden "You spend a too much money on your garden!" with a proud little nod at having correctly expressed the problem.I looked him straight in the eye and said (passionately of course)"It's what I love." He had the grace to turn red and say "Oh." Why wouldn't that be the answer he was expecting? I quietly left a handful of cigarette butts on his inverted garbage can lid(tossed into my beds by his son.) And that could well be another pet--why do people think those things are acceptable to toss on the ground? Do you know that in the small towns of France they smoke but the butts go in public ashtrays! Waiting for that idea to catch on here.... I gotta stop this pdq.
la

I am afraid to even respond to this because it seems like eventually all of the things I dislike (or think I dislike) in gardens end up in my garden.

For example I have a garden Gnome. It was given to me as a joke by a brother in-law. Well he now has a name (Walter) and is part of my garden. He even overwinters in the shed for protection. I came around when I found that moving him around into garden beds seemed to protect them from my nemesis the groundhog.

So here are my pet peeves. The orange/red mulch...why do people want their yards to look like gas stations? Red salvia - it is always planted in very bad areas and most often in the single line. This plant, I think, suffers the worst abuse by non-thinking people who believe that anything should grow when put in a small hole in the dirt in their yard. I guess that is my biggest pet peeve, people that seem to not realize that you have to think about the soil inorder to really garden.

I don't know if it is still there but in a small town on the way to Sacramneto, I think it is Lock, there was a woman who did her yard in all diffrent kinds of toilets and used them for planters. I always smile when I think of her creativity. I thought it was great.

Luanne, that's funny about your talk with the pastor.

In a town near me..Carla's town in fact, there is a yard with a toilet planter in the front yard and a few other knicknacks. They have a sign that says, "Donate Yard Decorations Here". I like it. I do believe the flowers in the toilet are plastic.

One of the neatest yard objects I've seen was a big old iron bed planted full of flowers.
Speaking of flamingos, darn if I don't have a yellow heron in my rose bed! Same difference! Long neck, long legs. It's not plastic, but still.
I don't like azaleas and forsythia pruned into balls either but do like boxwood and hollies round sometimes. Most gnomes I've seen look good. I even have a concrete statue of a wizard with an owl on his shoulder and a frog with his head on his hand.
Pot calling kettle black,
Linda

Nobody mentioned spaghetti cement edging? Maybe it is just in this part of the country. Every new development comes with your standard landscaping, including the ever popular spaghetti cement edging and red mulch, in the classic kidney shape blob on the front yard.

Olga, loved your garden by the way.

I think it might be fun to start a photo thread of some of these "nightmares".....Perhaps I'll take my camera out with me today as I drive around...I'll probably include pictures from my own yard to scare some of you...

Robert

My mom sent me a statue of a cat looking through binoculars. I put it right out front looking towards my cherry tree which has a bird feeder in it. Some people drive by quick and stop, thinking it's a real cat.

RE plastic flowers. The first two houses when you enter our subdivision were models and had beautiful, if kinda boring landscaping (at least they had SOME). Of course they were sold to people who knew nothing about gardening and could care less (one barely mows his lawn, or lawn of weeds). All winter the first house had these cheesy pink plastic flowers in the front. One day while driving by, my husband (gardening challenged) said 'those are nice, we should get those, they bloom all winter!'. He didn't believe me when I said they were plastic. 'Who would put plastic flowers in their yard?'.

Melissa, I have friends who live in a seashore town near me, and they love to grow plants for the birds, bees, and butterflies. Unfortunately for them, their landscaping ideas did not suit their neighbors, nor the town governing body, and they were actually cited for an "overgrown" property!!!

I guess the neighbors won't be happy until my friends go "dinky", mow everything to the ground, replace all vegetation with bright white stones and plant a pathetic few red and yellow celosia. Sad, no?

OK...my main pet peeve....flowers grown inside an old tire that's been painted white. Egad!

Great moments in movies involving Gnomes:

The Full Monty-you have to see it for yourself. Doesn't bear explaining.

Wallace and Grommit, Curse of the Were Rabbit (gnome hides a security camera behind its eyes to catch rabbits)

I really need to learn to post pics because there is a guy by my friend's place who has plastic flowers all over the yard, and flowers or who knows what growing in those white 3 gallon ice cream buckets, wooden cutouts all over.
It is truly a shrine to bad taste. No wonder the For Sale sign has been up for so long.

"A shrine to bad taste..." sounds like something I want to have painted on a sign!

Some very funny comments, I laughed a lot!

Well in the defense of mulch, I use grass clippings over newspaper. i think it looks good and is far superior and easier than trying to keep the beds weed free.

Well the most obnoxious front yard in our area is a small pond surrounded by these big odd shaped rocks, and scattered all over the "lawn".

Oh yes, I forgot my neighbors front yard in which he has put all sorts of rusted old farm machinery. The final touch is a plastic deer pulling a hay rake. Now he lets the grass grow until it is knee high then he finally mows it using this immense tractor that makes an enormous noise, something for use on a farm for cutting hay, I think. And weed wacks around the old farm stuff for hours. He loves noise making machinery. And we are at odds over our vastly different politics which doesn't help when he revs up his stuff. Oh yes did I mention his chain saw for cutting fire wood. Of which he has a huge pile on his lawn.

As you can tell I live in a once predominately farming area.
t

I think I love everybody's garden, whether it be full of yard ornaments or classicly groomed or cottage style or just a few daylilies here and there -

but the one thing that drives me crazy is when something tips over, like the birdbath or the garden gnome or the pink flamingo, and no one EVER STANDS IT UP AGAIN! It becomes the focal point of the garden for me every time I drive by and causes the hair on the back of my neck to rise up and my teeth to grit. I'm always tempted to pull over and sprint in there and stand it back up but there are a lot of hunters in our area and I'm positive that their spouses can also load those rifles. So I suffer in silence.

(tee hee!)

joet1485---Some of us love the informal look of old roses and tend to be judicious when it comes to pruning and shaping. Some of us (alas I am one!) probably keep purchasing more plants than we really have time to tend. I hope you would not deny us that pleasure just because our plants tend to look a bit unkempt. Some of us actually prefer that look.

Here is a link that might be useful: Outer rose hedge

"A shrine to bad taste..." We use those plastic poinsettia flowers in the winter for our flower box. It is just something for texture.

You have given me an idea. I will check out the plastic farm at the hobby store and see what I can find to irritate everyone with.

Actually there is a lot of work having a gnome farm. One has to keep all of those suckers painted and stuff. Some are even cute. I can admire them in others yards. If I get my BB gun fixed they will make great targets also. Super!

I am very lazy and Mr. Mulch is our friend. I am also cheap and I got one busted bag of bright RED mulch out of the 12 or so I got to cover the leaf-grass almost mulch in my newer bed. It is hard to spot in the jungle.

Green is nice in some ways. It covers a lot of sins.

Foghorn

Sometimes I think someone's garden is 'not right' but I am
almost afraid to think it, because I always wonder if my
garden really looks ok. It is in the front yard. I
didn't like a neighbor who said "What are you trying to do,
make a botanical garden?" (whatever that means).

I don't like tipped over wheel barrels with flowers
growing out of them...and flowers growing out of chairs. Just
seems everyone is doing it now.

Olga, that's the best looking mulch I've ever seen! How do you get it to look so gorgeous? In my dreams my front yard is mulched exactly like yours. :)

Above all, poor maintenance.

Even the most ordinary plants, beautifully cultivated and sensitively placed and pruned, creates a wonderful garden.

Even the most splendid design and exotic plantings, if unwatered, unweeded, unloved, is a waste.

One thing that makes me feel bad to see is small spruce or other large type evergreens planted in their infancy smack dab up against the building. Our neighbor has 2 blue spruce that were planted about 2' apart and are now 4' tall and totally one sided because they were planted against the siding and each other. Poor things - they could have been nice trees given the proper siting. Now they'll be cut down someday because they're "too big" - or worse yet, someone will limb them up above the eaves of the house into some kind of awkward umbrella!

Other than plant misuse/abuse, I find other people's gardens fun to look at. I don't always agree with people's taste, but what they think up is of interest to me none the less. Most of the time I can find something or other to admire. And it's the very spirit of gardening that I admire most. :-)