the battle of the backyard

A number of y'all have asked me how things are coming along since the post about the sorry state of my yard. Have I made any progress?

Why, I'm so glad you asked.

I actually have been making progress on it. You know how they say that sometimes you have to really break something down so that you can build it back up better, stronger? My yard situation went from overgrown and tragic to...truly tore-up-from-the-floor-up. Some of the weeds had gotten so advanced that I actually thought they were trees. Seriously, a saw was involved in their removal. Weird mystery vines were attempting to strangle and garrotte my azaleas.
I had a lot of work to do to get rid of all that, and my actions toward that end less resembled gardening than a five-state killing spree. I set about digging up roots and hacking at unruly branches and yanking violently at tenacious vines. I'm telling you, I got medieval on it. At the end of that weekend, eight mostly-dead shrubs from my front yard had been dragged to the curb, and in the backyard, a veritable army of thick and nasty weeds (and weed-trees) had been unceremoniously hacked to their deaths. I dragged every sharp, spiky, heavy bit of it out to the curb myself, piling the carnage three feet high for the city to pick up.

So last weekend, Bubbie came to town to help me out with the Warrior Princess' eighth birthday sleepover, an event which traumatizes me still. Remind me to tell you about it. Bubbie was a HUGE help with that, and also, she brought with her some plants. Bubbie is actually a genius with plants. She's not a pristine apron, potting shed kind of gardener, either. She just really loves plants. Knows their names, knows whether they like shade or sun, knows whether they'll play well with others. And she's learned this over the course of some forty years. Bubbie knows from plants. So she came to Little Rock loaded down with a styrofoam cooler full of plants from her own yard - turkey vine, strawberry begonias, elephant ears, really great stuff. Much more my speed than all the formal, fussy, high-maintenance plants that had been there before, which were resplendent for a week out of the year, but looked like crap the rest of the time.
So after the last guest left after Lily's party, my parents (my dad had come around, too, by this time) came to help me put my house back together. My mom and I briefly discussed where and how to plant the plants she'd brought, I thanked them for all their help, and they left. The slumber party had left me an exhausted shell of my former self, but I didn't want the plants to die, so I figured I'd better get them in the ground, stat.
Part of my Yard Beautification Plan is to do away with the boilerplate Chenal insta-landscape shrub balls in the front of my yard, and replace them with lower-maintenance plants for a lush, naturalized landscape. I had dug out about four shrubs myself in previous weeks before I decided that this was work better and more efficiently left to my lawn guys, whom I subsequently enlisted to get rid of about 10 of the aforementioned shrub balls - you know, those little shrubs that everyone trims into neat little balls - and replace them with ground cover. The turkey vine my mother had brought filled the bill perfectly. Martin and Jose were supposed to have extracted the shrub balls by the time my mother brought her plants, but it had rained. Fortunately, they were in the neighborhood that day, so I tabled the transplanting of the ground cover in the front yard, and moved into the backyard.
I planted the strawberry begonias in a back bed in the shade - they'll do well there. My mother had also given me some weird hydrangea. She explained to me what the deal was with this plant, but apparently it's not the same big-blue-ball hydrangea most people think of. Bubbie said it would like this one particular space in my backyard, so I had to move more unwanted plants to put the hydrangea in its new spot.
By this point, I was just stupid exhausted. I was into major yardwork, and the nap I'd been promising myself was nowhere on the horizon. Now that all of the major weed and bush extraction had taken place in the backyard, and it was starting to look like something not entirely disastrous, I was seeing things left and right that needed taking care of. I pruned a couple of trees, did some weeding, hauled off branches, raked out beds. I was again a stinky, sweaty, wild-haired banshee on a kamikaze death mission. My legs were covered in dirt and bites and scratches. I ran up on a massive colony of ants that had taken up residence in a retaining wall, and did battle with some poison ivy. I'm telling you, it was war. I looked like I had been doing battle with some Huns.
Finally, Martin and Jose rolled up, and the three of us went to work on the front beds. They dug up shrub after shrub, and together we smoothed out the soil. Then I took a double-pronged hoe and got busy planting the turkey vine. I fetched them glasses of ice water and we made a little small talk - very small, since they don't know a lot of English and I don't know a lot of Spanish. I think they were mainly amused that I was out there sweating like a pig along with them, instead of walking around in a tennis skirt, talking on my cell phone while they slogged it out.
After they'd finished and moved the perfectly healthy shrubs around to the side of my house, awaiting pickup from the neighbors who'd called dibs, I walked around and noticed something disturbing. We have jasmine growing on the fence bordering our next door neighbor's house and backing up to the brick wall of our house, outside my bedroom. It seems that this jasmine is very healthy. And thriving. And attempting to enter my bedroom window! In text parlance: WTF?!
Oh, hell no, I thought. What is this, Grey Gardens? Can stray raccoons and a visit to environmental court be far behind? How could I have let this happen on my watch? I mean, the Colonel would probably never have even noticed. Every spring, he would have obliviously mused gosh, it sure smells nice in here! But I should have known better! I marched resolutely into my garage to retrieve a ladder. In order to prop it up against the wall by my bedroom window, I had to climb up a muddy embankment. There wasn't enough space for me to stand the ladder up properly, so I carefully propped it up against the wall, and up I went. I yanked jasmine out right and left. Its sticky roots were grabbing on for dear life. One little tendril had literally worked its way between the windowsill and the window frame and was straining to enter the inner sanctum of my bedroom. Not. Happening. I gave one more good yank.
That's when I knew I was going down.
It's amazing the linear progression of thoughts that one is able to have in the second it takes to fall from a high place.
Oh, shit. Oh, no. What can I grab? The screen? Nope, it'll peel right off. And I'm not giving this damn jasmine the satisfaction. Stupid friggin' vine. Christ, I'm an idiot for letting this happen. Okay, if I grab the ladder...ugh, I'm on a hill, it'll land on me and I'll get creamed. (I shoved the ladder securely against the wall to ensure that it didn't topple on top of me.) Ow, was that my fingernail? Man, this is taking a long time...oof! I hit the ground, slid down the muddy hill on my face, and eventually sort of oozed to a stop.
After a second or two, I managed to right my wrecked body, which was covered in dirt and grass and blood. I feebly removed the ladder from the wall and somehow maneuvered it back into the garage, and then limped - no, hobbled really - into the house. I ran myself a bath, washed away the matted yard trash from my bruised and scratched-up skin, snagged a bag of frozen peas from the freezer to ice my twisted ankle (how'd I twist my ankle? I have no recollection of that), took two ibuprofen, and told the WP that everything's cool, okay? But Mommy's going to take a nice long nap.

I still can't believe I got my ass kicked by a jasmine vine. Oh, the humanity.
This isn't over, yard. I will have my vengeance.