Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Shady landscape

A while back, I posted a few pictures of the course snack shack during it's much needed remodeling.  Now that the building is up to par, the landscaping needed a major face lift.  The tricky part of this location is shade on top of shade.  You could probably grow bats next to this building because there is so little sunlight.
This spot is very busy with golfers arriving at 6 green, heading to 7 tee, and six holes later, pulling in to 13 tee.  Traffic patterns have developed on both sides of the path so we've expanded to accommodate two carts side by side.  To do this we used decomposed granite which becomes extremely hard, but still accepts water.  The gold color of the DG contrasts the gray cartpath and adds a new color to the landscape.  I love using this material for its low cost, easy install, and minimal maintenance.
A shady location such as this will not support most plants you encounter in a California nursery.  Of course, we were able to find plenty of options by asking around at the local nursery.  We came up with a mix of gardenia, blue fescue, camellias, liriope grasses, a gorgeous rhododendron, and a ground cover called black ajuga.   The design was completed by two beautiful Japanese maples and a couple of tall podacarpus to hide the downspouts.  A generous member here at the club offered to pay for all of the planting material and picked out the maples and podacarpus himself.  A big thanks to MG for all of the help and his constant support!!
Planting went quickly and the finished product is ready well before the start of the 49th Annual Delta Classic.  We are going to wait to install drip line and a soaker hose for the impatiens for next Monday.  Right now we have a couple thousand trees to weedeat, fairway markers to polish, cartpaths to clean up, suckers to trim, ........... oh, and the bocce court to ready for Thursday night.  This event is a lot of fun and a great way to kick off the year.  We schedule many projects between the rain of winter and the start of the Invitational so there is always some improvements to see during the tournament.  The list grows longer every day, so we'll be just as busy after the trophies are awarded.

0 comments:


Followers