I just got a call from the Giuseppe Agrippa the Landscaper working on my Mississauga project. He was having trouble sourcing a particular plant. It seems that Jodi Liptrott who designed the layout and chose the plants for my landscaping project chose a plant called Japanese Spurge to place under my new ivory silk lilac tree. She told me it would look great and spread nicely. I never bothered to look it up , trusting her to know what was best.
I’ve looked it up.
Never did I imagine that Japanese Spurge was what I grew up calling Pachysandra.
Never did I imagine the flood of memories about my family, especially the women, that would come flooding back to me with this discovery.
Through out my life I have been surrounded by this plant! Now we are using it in my Mississauga Landscaping project!
I grew up in an old farm house in the Town of Montgomery, New York. It was a big run down house that my parents bought as their second home moving us out of the City of Newburgh and into the country where we would have space to run and play without getting into too much trouble. We had about 2 acres to run wild in. There was a farm house in front, a large garage with an attic that we would use as a club house, and a dangerous dilapidated barn that would later be torn down and rebuilt as a barn like structure for my maternal grandparents to live in.
Run wild we did and we got into trouble too, but not too much! I remember my brother and I pulling my sister up after her leg fell through the floor of the second floor of the barn once. We were forbidden to be up there of course. My brother actually fell out of the second story loft and onto a cement slab once when he was exploring on his own. He did not even tell me, his big sister, about that till months later. He said he was peering over the edge and fell, woke up we guess moments, minutes, or more later, and did not tell anyone because he did not want to get into trouble. That of course explains a lot about my brother! ;-p
But I digress… I started talking about the Japanese Spurge that is to be planted in my new front yard landscaping project. Why all these memories are coming back is that every house I ever lived in had Pachysandra on site. The house in Montgomery had it all round the base of the house on most sides, around many of the trees, along the path from the house to the barn that was later my grandparent’s home. There were jars of it rooting on the kitchen window sill from my earliest memories. Where ever nothing else would grow in went this plant.
When I married ,(21 years ago this week!) my reception was held in the back yard of the old farm house. My mother, father, sister, grandmother and I began working on sprucing up the landscaping that Spring. My brother dodged the chore, he way away serving in the U.S. Navy on a nuclear submarine. He always managed to avoid the fun family landscaping projects! We began the process if pulling out the pachysandra from the areas it had overtaken and using those to root in old milk jugs to fill in areas we thought needed filling in. There were jam jars of pachysandra on the kitchen window, jugs of pachysandra on the screen porch. There was pachysandra growing in a vase in my grandmother’s house in her bathroom! It was taking over! I remember asking my mom and grandmother “Why don’t we just buy a few flats and move on!” They scolded me, “Are you kidding me! Do you know how much that would cost!”
Later as newly weds the home we owned had a very small shady back yard. Guess what we did? We broke out the old milk jugs and went over to my parents house and took clippings from here and there and lived with milk jugs full of rooting Pachysandra all winter long till we could plant it in the Spring. After our son was born when my husband changed jobs and we moved to Vermont there was pachysandra already planted there under the evergreens by the woods.
And so this week I find myself buying pachysandra. I know I’ll never walk by that greenery without thinking of my Mom and my Grandma and of all the houses and memories. I’m laughing through the tears imaging what Mom and Grandma would say about me buying Pachysandra. (Or should I say Japanese Spurge.)
Jodi M. Liptrot of JML Landscape Design helped us with the design. http://www.jml-landscapedesigner.ca/
Giuseppe Agrippa from Vaughan Landscaping is our contractor. http://www.vaughanlandscaping.ca/
UPDATE: We were NOT happy with the quality of the work performed by Vaughan Landscaping. Check our comment below for details.
4:54 pm on August 4th, 2009
I loved this Anne. I can easily picture the old house
7:33 pm on August 11th, 2009
Great story!!! Really enjoyed it. I’ll bring a jar over for some clippings
7:04 pm on April 21st, 2010
Here is a follow up to our landscaping experience from last year. In general we still love Jodi Liptrot who did the design. Not so pleased with Giuseppe Agrippa from Vaughan Landscaping however.
In our front lawn is one of those big metal utility boxes. We made it very clear to him that that area would need to be hand dug. He did not. He cut the cable for the our neighbour’s cable and Rogers had to be called in to repair. He later ran over and broke one of our neighbour’s sprinkler heads. Fortunately that particular neighbour is quite handy and had an extra sprinkler head on hand and did not mind repairing it himself.
While we are on the subject of what our neighbours thought… the language used by the crew at Vaughan Landscaping is hardly PG. Our yard borders the walkway to the park. Sadly several young children coming and going to the park probably learned some new vocabulary words. Don’t get me wrong. I know sometimes in the heat of a project when something goes wrong things can get a little heated but this seemed to be none stop. It was not an occasional slip but rather routine.
Oh and remember I mentioned we lived on the park? Well one of Mississauga’s Park Maintenance crew paid us a visit to tell us the landscaper was dumping soil in the park. This is clearly not allowed. It was also not necessary since we did pay for a dump bin for this purpose. Funny the bin arrived partially full. I was billed for a whole dump though.
Giuseppe’s website seems to portray him as this elegant artistic professional. My husband and I would disagree with that portrayal. He had trouble reading the plans we had drawn up professionally by Jodi Liptrot. We found this odd since he and Jodi seem to work together often. He did not read the elevations correctly and had to take out and re-do some of the work. Not sure if it was ignorance, or if he was trying to get away with using less materials. Fortunately we caught the mistake and hubby helped him learn to read the plans correctly.
I a related development when he finally did bring me my Japanese Spurge, several weeks after the project was wrapped up he planted it in the wrong spot, even though he still had the plans. Not sure why. He planted it all over the yard instead of just around the tree. So I had to go around and dig it all up and replant it where it was suppose to be. That was when I really noticed how crappy the soil he put down was… nothing like the triple mix I bought for another project. More like the clay he originally was suppose to dig out.
In a related incident the dark brown cedar mulch was not in fact dark brown or cedar. The clump tree was just a single. The quality of the plants was not very good.
Since the quality of the job was not up to snuff we held back $1000. for quite a while. I made it clear we would be sending him the money when we confirmed that the plants came up in the Spring. I eventually sent him the money, even though I have some doubts about if some of the plants will make it. He became quite belligerent and threatened to come and tear out all his work. That is illegal of course.
After having him harass us for months we decided to just pay him and move on with our life… well… and of course take sometime out to write this up for you all to read if you are thinking of getting any work done by Vaughan Landscaping.
Just to be clear. I would NOT higher Giuseppe Agrippa or Vaughan Landscaping again.
7:45 pm on April 21st, 2010
Oh yes, one more thing. Today we had someone in to look at installing a watering system. During our conversation Vaughan Landscaping came up. This particular gentleman did not have a positive experience with them either…