A very long time ago, I wrote about a little complication in my life: I’d just bought my first house, a gardener’s dream, but I’d discovered that the back and side yards were… paved. “Come on,” you say, ”surely you must have known that when you bought it!” Well, no. We bought our house in February. Now, I challenge you to find out what kind of land you have in Quebec City in February. It was when I revisited the house after the snow had melted that I discovered… the pot aux roses. As you can imagine, for someone who has dreamed of having his own garden all his life, it was quite a shock!
Asphalt, Almost Zero Maintenance
Obviously, as a laidback gardener, I should have been happy. After all, asphalt is almost zero maintenance! But let’s just say I wanted something a little greener. In any case, the asphalt was being seriously eaten away by one of the few plants the previous owners had planted, goutweed (Aegopodium podagraria). So I decided to remove the asphalt, all of it (and the drip grass too!), and convert my backyard into a real garden.
Of course, removing asphalt takes time and effort. I couldn’t imagine removing it all in a single year, at least not without burning myself out. So I incorporated asphalt removal into my landscaping plan, a step-by-step plan spread over… 47 years (either you’re lazy, or you’re not!). The asphalt removal was spread over six years. And the good news is that, six summers later, it’s effectively over.
A Long-Term Project
I still remember the reactions of people who came to visit our house over the last five years. I explained at the time that I had removed half the asphalt from the backyard in the first year. Now, a half-paved yard is still a bit surprising. The usual comment? But I thought you’d removed the asphalt! Encouraging, isn’t it, to work like mad to remove as much asphalt as possible and see that most visitors thought I hadn’t even started yet?
So I’m all the happier to share this news with you: there’s no more asphalt in my yard! My yard now looks like any other yard around here: grass, a few trees and shrubs, and flowers… Okay, maybe there’s less grass than in most yards and more flowers, but still, it’s closer to the norm.
A Trick to Remove the Asphalt
Over the past two years, however, I’ve found a way to remove asphalt without expending as much energy as in the early years, when I did it myself using a jackhammer. It’s the perfect trick for the laidback gardener: pay someone else to do it for you! I don’t know why I hadn’t thought of it sooner (but the fact that I didn’t have the budget for it was probably a big factor!). And not with a jackhammer, but with a mechanical excavator. Not only does the shovel break up the asphalt even faster, it also removes the residue.
In other years, you see, with the jackhammer, breaking up asphalt was just the beginning: in addition, each piece had to be removed one after the other, by hand, and moved. Given the size of the challenge, I didn’t do the obvious, which was to drive the asphalt down to the street and get rid of it completely. The street, on my steeply sloping lot, is almost two stories lower. So going down two flights of stairs with large, heavy pieces of asphalt, only to come right back up, is a lot of effort for a lazy gardener. So I hid it in the backyard. The rock garden in the corner and the mound at the back are 95% asphalt and only 5% good soil and ornamental stones. And the stepping stones that cross my flower beds? That, too, is asphalt.
Letting Others Work
What’s more, I had another flash of genius. I thought I could hire someone else, at least occasionally, to do jobs that, as a laidback gardener, I didn’t want to do myself. Granted, it was going to cost more, but when you consider that I support my family by writing, and that the weeks I spent annually breaking up asphalt and moving it around were weeks when no income came in, it was more than justifiable (sad to note, though, that a single eight-hour workday for an excavator operator is almost equivalent to 160 hours of work for an author!).
In fact, I’m beginning to enjoy letting others do the work for me. Last summer, I hired my daughter-in-law to paint the house, cart dirt and do other odd jobs around the house. This enabled me to write a book that I wouldn’t normally have had time to write.
No worse, right? I’m beginning to discover how to be laidback… and make it pay, too! All I need now is to patent the method and sell it, and I’ll be a multimillionaire in no time! Hmm, I’ve got an idea… I wonder if my son has found a job, I could give him the contract…
Larry Hodgson published thousands of articles and 65 books over the course of his career, in both French and English. His son, Mathieu, has made it his mission to make his father’s writings accessible to the public. This text was originally published in Fleurs, plantes, jardins in December 2000.
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This is a charming reminder of your lovely father, whose “laziness” would put the most industrious of us to shame.
Wow, what a journey! Turning asphalt into a beautiful garden must have been tough but totally worth it. I love how you didn’t rush and took it step by step. Your story is super inspiring for anyone dreaming of their own green space!