Hidden House
This photo of my house popped up on my Facebook Memories today. Last year I let the Virginia creeper do what it wanted. When I bought the place, the front door had a little enclosed porchlet (where the tenant had installed a washer & drier!) and the creeper covered it. I had the porch thing removed and the creeper crept around the garden, getting into everything. Then I let it attack the house.
I loved the effect.
My son-in-law’s aunt was in town that summer and came over to see me…and went back, baffled, unable to find the front door.
But Virginia creeper gets into the facade ‘boards’ and clutters up the gutter, so in the fall I did the sensible thing, sob. But at least a cutting has taken on the chain-link fence at the side of the property, where it can go crazy, no prob.
The front yard still has that jungle effect, but the house’s bare boring face hangs out now.
Here’s a pic from the previous summer, when the creeper was just getting started on the house.
12/10/2020 @ 10:08 pm
A chain link fence is a good place for it. I have managed to confine my VC to a rickety broken down fence line and the garage. It looks good but it’s treacherous stuff!
12/11/2020 @ 12:02 pm
I had a building w. night lights go up beyond my back fence that spoiled my day view and invaded the night; someone gave me some stiff heavy fencing and I got my handyman to instal it to produce a 15+ft section of fence to block, and I planted hops, which had grown a mad mass back east…but here have been slow and skimpy. Well, so is the piece of VC on fence elsewhere. I guess it takes time (of which I don’t have the same kind of unlimited quantities I used to have). (I used to look out my back window and see nothing but trees and beyond that a mountain, no sign of the little industrial park back there, the houses, the busy end of the Coqahalla highway [TV’s Highway to Hell] with fast-food and grocery and a dozen motels, and more houses beyond…all hidden by trees and the little hill of the railway tracks. Now, at least in winter, I see the roof of this thing [an excellent biz, actually, where you take your recyclables] and summer/winter their security lights destroy the night illusion of being back out in the middle of nowhere…)
12/11/2020 @ 7:44 am
Could this be what
J R R Tolkien had in mind when he described the home of a Hobbit in the Shire?
12/11/2020 @ 11:39 am
Great observation
12/11/2020 @ 12:04 pm
That’s indeed the vibe I was going for. The house is just a boring rectangle, but being lost in the greenery moves it to another plane.
12/11/2020 @ 8:22 am
Your house is so cool. I like the vines too. An asset in my book, that no one can find the front door 🙂
I have rampant ivy that keeps creeping towards the house. During my tenure, it has grown up the trunk of an old growth ginko tree in the backyard, and I love how beautiful it looks. One of my neighbors is a tree surgeon and says I need to slice the little ivy trunks off around the base of the tree or else it will kill the tree, so I guess this is its last winter. It stays green all winter and I’ll miss that view.
12/11/2020 @ 12:09 pm
Yeah, I really got off on having a hidden door. Reminds me of a FB thing the other day – pic of a front door mat that says COME BACK WITH A WARRANT. My daughter next door used to have one that said GO AWAY.
This is ivy country – not as bad as further south in Seattle, but there are specimens working on taking over the world. I don’t have any here (not even any morning glory, that my older daughter in the next block complains about), but blackberry is everywhere, surrounding the yard, sending tendrils thru the fence, popping up here and there…and it doesn’t even produce berries (and why should it bother – it’s found a quicker way to get itself everywhere).
12/11/2020 @ 9:01 am
Thank you for all you do.
Specially revelled pastel.
Magnetic Claude Monet.
San JoseSharks,dishTV?
Heat source? Hoot owls?
Drone drop cloned zone?
NauticalsmilesAlbertaCN
12/11/2020 @ 12:12 pm
Must post pics of garden
Monet if he had buttercup
weed. Far from old Alberta
these days, blizzards & dust
and red red necks………………
12/12/2020 @ 7:11 am
I never knew that ivy could be so invasive until I lived in this house. Every spring, I head out and rip out massive piles. It creeps towards the house like it knows it’s there. A couple summers ago, I was sick and couldn’t do the spring yank and in the fall, found ivy growing under the slab the house sits on, rooted so deep I couldn’t pull it out. Now it has a little colony there that I nip because it can’t be pulled. I half expect to find it growing out of the downstairs toilet some morning.
Lol, the door mats. I want one.
12/11/2020 @ 1:57 pm
all kinds of weather
things /hawk\ wings
can only get Bette r
painting blue peace
sign: stretch canvas
wolves in winter lair
taut wire, old winter
\/somuch/\ depends
flareredwheelbarrow
rusted tremble years
oldmanriver must no
more crisp coy iceflo
in acronyms we swim