ADD

Or, Why I $%#@ing HATE Palm Trees

Today I realized that palm-trees are not ADD-friendly.

I came to this realization in a round about way because of the mice.  As I mentioned last week, my house has been invaded by rodents. The good news is that they’re not roof rats like I thought; they’re house mice, which are certainly a problem to have living in the walls, but they’re not significant disease vectors either. I had no idea mice could be so darn LOUD.

To make a long story short, in order to trap the mice, I need to clean up my yard. Yard work isn’t so bad once I actually start doing it, but it’s one of those tasks where I have trouble getting started. My yard is ringed by mature trees, many of them tropical species.  It’s very shady so I can’t plant my own stuff, which means I’m not motivated to take care of plants I planted.  I’ve got several trees, most of which I wouldn’t have chosen, and none of which will be overcome by weeds. I think the last time I cleaned up my yard was … 2005? Seriously.

Which gets me to the palm trees. Weeding my yard wasn’t even the bad part. It didn’t take me much time to finish the first third of my yard, and I could easily see what I’d accomplished:

This part of the yard had weeds that came up over my knees. I cleared it in an hour.

So today, I went out to finish the other half. The important half. The half that the pest control people will need to access in order to set their traps tomorrow. After three and a half hours of work, it looked like this:

The whole yard used to look like that super-green area toward the back. In front is a very leggy butterfly bush.

Yeah, that’s right. Clearing the same amount of space took three times as long. Why? Because of those #@$^&%@ palm trees!

In truth, it’s not just the palms, it’s all the tropical plants in my yard. There are four different types of palms (some of them much skinnier than others), a few banana trees (that don’t produce fruit because it’s too cold, but there are some very weird-looking flowers on them), and a calistemon or “bottlebrush” (a tree native to Hawai’i, with a weeping growth habit). In order to get to the weeds, I had to prune the calistemon severely, and then hack my way through wilting palm fronds and banana branches. Then I had to clear the fallen fronds from the ground. Then, and only then, could I actually start weeding. On Friday, I spent an hour filling our two 32 gallon compost bins and two 33 gallon compostable yard waste bags — that’s 130 gallons, for those of you keeping score at home. Today, before I could even start pulling weeds, I filled both compost bins and three yard waste bags.  That’s right.  163 gallons of palm tree detritus, before I could even start weeding.

The bin in back is 32 gallons, the compostable yard waste bag in front is 33 gallons

These are the banana branches I had to hack through in order to get at the ground to weed.

A large pile of banana leaves. My tiny lens does not do it justice.

It got me thinking about how much I hate tropical plants. They’re all well and good when they’re in the jungle. Jungles, by definition, are overgrown. My northern California yard should not be. Furthermore, tropical plants grow all year round, which means they drop leaves and fronds all year round. Many of them are too big to just rake up, which means you have to collect them by hand. For someone with ADD, this presents one of those barriers to action which keep us from getting started on the task at hand.

Older branches (the grey ones) slowly collapse until they're in the way of foot traffic. The stalks of these fronds are very hard, sharp, and serrated. This is not good.

So my advice to you, if you have ADD and are planning a landscaping project, is to avoid the tropicals. Pick trees that drop their leaves once a year, so you only have to rake once a year, or plant conifers. Pick plants that have open, upright growth habits. If you like trees with a weeping habit, like willows or some varieties of flowering cherry, be sure and plant them far enough away from other trees that they don’t become tangled and forbidding. Check a gardening book for trees to plant near swimming pools, as these trees are selected because they’re less messy. Double check with your local plant nursery or garden center.

Having ADD doesn’t mean you can’t have a beautiful outdoor space. Just be sure and find plants that are low-maintenance and ADD-friendly.