Back Yard Landscape Design
It is natural to seek some distinction in decorating your back yard, some display of individualism.
The front yard — rightly, by the way — presents ourselves to the rest of the community as a team player, a holder of standards, an individual, yes, but joined in common cause with the rest of the crew.
Here we have the neatly cut lawn, the trimmed fruit trees, the shoveled driveway after the snowstorm.
One of those polished glass globes on a small pedestal, or some artfully placed pelicans, or wooden replicas of older women bending over and displaying their bloomers as they weed the flowers?
Maybe.
If that is to your taste.
I do not say that it is to mine.
But the back yard lends itself to a little more variety and room for innovation, and can be custom fit to match your personality and interests.
The unadventurous go for the ordinary – gazebos, swimming pools, wrought iron seating of one sort or another – but why not go ahead and honestly put your stamp on your own little piece of geography?
Boiling, steaming, seething tar pits are an option that a lot of homeowners are taking a look at today and wondering if they can find a home in the back acreage.
No longer confined to illustrations from the encyclopedia set that your parents bought at the grocery store, one volume per month, the modern tar pit can be an intriguing but still charming addition to the back yard view.
True, early models tended to draw into its ‘foul clutches’ — to use some overdone marketing lingo from the early years — every bird, rabbit, squirrel, possum, raccoon, mole, and rodent, to which a lot of people would respond, ‘so, tell me what the problem is again?’
Those early owners could look with equanimity on the prospect of the archeological finds that children many generations from now would discover when they dug up the fossilized remains of these unwary creatures, who were probably ready to be weeded out of the Great Circle of Life in any event.
But the process did tend to denude the backyard and in fact several square miles on either side of any form of animal life, and all in all was too good at its job.
Today’s tar pits are largely ornamental and serve predominantly as a suburban waste disposal system.
Why compost when you can utterly destroy?
Grass clippings, junk you have hauled up from the basement, old Army boots and the like, all can be safely, or at least effectively, tossed into the yawning maw of your own personal tar pit, what you might call Mother Nature’s original decycling system, and taken out of the Great Circle of Life altogether.
This is only the beginning of possible options in this category.
I wouldn’t for instance be too quick to pass up the opportunity to erect your own towering monolith in an adjoining quadrant of the yard.
These structures have been around for ages, but have usually been limited to bleak wastelands in the middle of nowhere, blasted highland heaths and what not.
True, it is a hard weekend’s work to install – perhaps longer, your descendants may in fact be working on this for centuries and you may have to bring in some outside help by invading a neighboring kingdom and bringing its people into bondage to help you complete it – but it makes for a striking tableaux there in your good old back yard.
I should mention that transportation may be a problem for the DIY enthusiast for this particular project.
Your local hardware store doesn’t carry these plinths, pillars, obelisks, and towering ornamental columns in the size and weights (several trillion tons) you’re going to need, so you might need to reroute a major river, say the Amazon, to float the building materials to the jobsite in a manner that, if you work it right, will remain unexplainable for eons. Hint to inquiring neighbors though that there might be supernatural elements at work.
Speaking of, as to any evil spirits or ancient unspeakable demonic entities that your new addition inadvertently awaken or “summon,” well, this too becomes part of the charm of your new back yard, and a sure-fire conversation starter at the next neighborly cookout.
Pyramids?
I say yes, though fine people go back and forth on this matter. They make for a striking sight as you sit on your deck of a soft summer night and look out over your little kingdom, breathing a sigh of quiet contentment.
You are satisfied with the understated and subtle feel that this towering behemoth of cruelly-cut rock and stone brings to the old homestead.
And really, nothing says to the neighbors and that damned homeowners’ association, “look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair!” like a pyramid.
You can put the guys working on the monolith onto the pyramid as they wrap up that project.
Volcanos? This comes up a lot in these planning discussions.
Some say you’ve already got the steaming tar pits and have therefore already ‘done’ the whole underground primitive menacing forces of nature thing, but to this I say a couple of things.
First, tar pits don’t explode and rain down death and fiery destruction, whereas these activities are more or less part of the job description of volcanoes.
Second, streaming rivers of glowing hot lava. Do I have to say more? No one does this particular backyard effect like a volcano.
Permit a personal fondness for something that you don’t see nearly enough of, even in the backyards of forward-looking homeowners: those vast ground level maps guiding alien marauders to their landing sites to undertake the annihilation of earth itself that you can only see from 30,000 feet or so up.
In an era of ‘me too’ backyard decorations, this one will really move you to the head of the pack at neighborhood gatherings.
Beyond these few suggestions, you are bound only by your own imagination.
Secret caverns leading to the center of the earth? Dig away, lad, dig away!
Just recall that those rough-hewn stairs giving you access to the Very Core of the Earth also will give any Half-Man/Half-Mole Tribe of Warmongering Creatures a ready path to your freshly-cut lawn. Just a word to the wise, my friend, just a word to the wise.
Parthenons and Pantheons, dense hedge mazes, the occasional severed dragon’s head, Colliseums where you pit savage animals one against the other?
All of these and more can add that ever-so-light touch to your backyard landscape designs, and make your house the envy, or least the dreaded looming presence, of the neighborhood.
