The challenge of taming a backyard jungle

It’s amazing how much damage years of simply neglect can do to a house.

That is what my wife Karen and I found out when we bought our Natick fixer-upper back in 2002.

The seller, a retired railway worker, didn’t hold big beer bashes or keep a houseful of mangy cats. Yet there is little evidence much got repaired or replaced during the 30 years he lived at the cut but rundown little village colonial on Marion Street.

The toilet in our new home’s single bathroom was in danger of plunging into the basement, the lights dimmed when you turned on the toaster, and the patterns were hard to make out on the wallpaper beneath the nicotine stains.

Those days, though, are happily history now, with a local builder having just finished putting a new addition on the back and renovating the older half.

Yet as bad as the house was, the real surprise how much work it has been to tame our jungle of a yard.

If you just let things go and grow for three decades, as the nice old fellow who sold us our house did, you’ve gone from a summer clean-up to a years-long reclamation project.

I love a few trees here and there, but the house was overwhelmed with a dense thicket of struggling, younger trees and dying older ones, with a huge line of overgrown shrubs out in front. Yes, it kept the house a bit cooler in the summer, but it also felt like we are living in perpetual gloom.

The yard had grass in the front, where sunlight could reach it, but big mud patches in back.

One plant, though, did thrive in your backyard, providing a nasty surprise to my wife as attempted to rein in the out-of-control vegetation – poison ivy.

That made for a miserable first summer in our new home.

Then, last but not least, was the rusty wire fence that surrounded three sides of our house. The fence had managed to become embedded over the years with some of our sickly trees, with rusty iron posts, driven deep into the ground, to secure it all.

Seven years later, and much sweating, digging and help in part from our trusty builder and his bulldozer, we are down to the last pieces of this early 20th century masterpiece.

Anyway, I had hoped a little weekend yard work would do the trick, but that illusion finally gave way after work on our new addition wrapped up this spring.

The overgrown trees were still there, but the yard was a rock and brick strewn mud patch.

So we threw up our hands and called in the equivalent of the Army Corps of Engineers, or our neighbor Joe and his local landscaping company.

Basically, it’s goodbye to the old yard altogether and hello to something new and hopefully much better.

Step one, clear cutting the jungle, is done, with all but one stately old tree in front and a couple of promising younger trees out back left.

That has opened up the sky and brought some needed some sunlight to my yard.

Step two comes this week, with work crews set to lay down a brick patio over half of the long, narrow strip that makes up the back yard. The side will be resoiled and replanted with grass – luckily the front had grass and has survived untouched.

It’s costing a lot more than I ever thought I would spend on landscaping – about $20,000.

But I now have sunlight. And soon that rusty old wire fence, like the smelly old bathroom that was falling into the basement, will be history too.