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Published on
Saturday, January 24, 2026.
By Victoria Torley
People sometimes ask me for landscaping
advice (usually before they see my
yard). My advice is usually to find a
real landscaper.
That’s because anyone who looks at my
yard can tell I am a “Hodgepodge
Landscaper.”
My landscape advice boils down to this:
If I like it, I buy it and worry about
where it goes later. Often much later.
My thinking goes like this. If I put it
‘here’ and don’t like it, I can always
move it ‘there.’ If it gets too tall, it
can be trimmed. If it insists on getting
too tall, it can be cut down.
If someone said it would grow to five
feet and it decides to stop at three,
but I need it to be five (maybe to hide
a fence), I can dig it out and toss it
out and find something else to put in
the hole I just made. If someone sells
me a plant with the promise: “It only
grows 10 inches tall,” and “it” has now
turned into a shrub, ditto.
Of course, there are things you fall in
love with because they smell wonderful
(gardenias, roses, jasmine) and you find
out that things love to eat them and you
have to give them up. My landscaping
advice is, why make yourself miserable?
Don’t plant them at all; find something
else that smells good.
Things that smell good include butterfly
white ginger. I started with maybe a dozen
roots, but nobody told me it would take
over the entire area. It spreads so fast
that we dug out 250 plants and gave them
to the local school for their
beautification project. Six months later,
I have no idea where we dug them out. They
do smell wonderful, but I am glad we put
them in the terraced area, otherwise they
would take over the world.
I do know a few things about landscaping,
though. For instance, there are things
that are “clumping” and things that are
“running.” The “running” things usually
run wild, like my butterfly white ginger
and need to be contained somehow. But the
worst, the very worst thing you can do in
your yard is plant running bamboo.
Bamboo is beautiful and it has its place,
but its place is not invading your
neighbor’s yard. There is a story from
about a man who found a lump in his
kitchen linoleum. His neighbor’s running
bamboo had run under the driveway and
under his house and was coming up in his
kitchen.
People sometimes plant bamboo to stabilize a
hillside but bamboo is so shallowly rooted
that it is often a failure especially on
steeper slopes. Do you want some bamboo
anyway? Make sure that what you buy is
“clumping bamboo,” and it will be wonderful.
Now, for anyone who needs some lovely
butterfly ginger, stop by any time and help
yourself.
Yes, bug. Last week I wrote about surprises.
This week I had another.
This is a termite trail. Termites like dark
places and sometimes there aren’t any so
they make their own. This particular trail
ran on the wall between orchid tables in my
greenhouse. And where did they get the
material for these little super highways?
From my wooden orchid mounts of course.
Anything that sat on a table, except
for pilón wood mounts, was infested
with termites.
In my own defense, I have never had a
greenhouse before and, although I had seen
an occasion ant, I had never noticed any
termites. Well, there you go. It’s a
learning curve and I have never been
curvaceous.
So, get some really good insecticide, long
sleeves, long pants, a good mask and some
gloves and spray those little monsters. And
the wood. Then I suggest that you put
something under your mounted orchids to
raise them off the table and out of whatever
drips when you water them. Good
luck!
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Find more interesting
stories about
gardening in
Costa Rica
on the
AM Costa Rica
Garden
Magazine. Questions on this
article, Ms.
Torley,
gardener
columnist, can
be reached by
emailing victoriatorley1@gmail.com
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