Work crew means trouble

We had the shingles on our roof replaced last week. Anybody who has had exterior work on their house knows that the plants are not the crew's main concern, and I knew this before the work started. I had prepared myself mentally (and emotionally) for some damage.

What I always forget though is that those who are not gardeners usually don't understand which plants can take some abuse and which really don't want to be fiddled with, be it hand, rake or whatever. So you sometimes get lucky and shingles are dropped on the right kind of plant (like bamboo above). Usually though you're not that lucky.

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In those cases, you get bent leaves:

Broken stems:

Missing plants:

There were two large Agastache foeniculum here.
Now there's half of one...

...and it's bent over to the ground.

It's not every plant that can handle first a tarp thrown over them, then shingles and other debris dropped upon them.

These weigela that I brought home from July's Garden Bloggers Fling in Portland were just starting to look pretty good:

Now they're a bit flat. I'm thinking they'll be fine, but I'd prefer them to look less ground-covery and a bit more upright.

I really should have moved many of these potted plants away from the house, but to be honest, I just didn't think about it. It would have been nice if the rep who set this all up would have mentioned that tarps and debris would be involved, but I'll know next time.

A few key plants were lucky and made it through even though I didn't remember they were in danger until the crew had finished. The plumeria for instance:

At first glance it looks to be untouched, but closer inspection reveals that a leaf is missing and that the little strange growth at the tip -- which I thought might be the start of a flower bud -- had been broken off. The plant as a whole though is fine, and since the growing season is almost over, I'm happy about that.

For the most part, they did a nice job and most of the plants were unaffected:

I don't think there was any damage on this side of the house, but maybe that's because little debris goes over the ends.

Here's a weird complaint: they swept up my porch!

That's only a complaint because there were hundreds of red whisker clammyweed seeds here that I was going to harvest soon:

I'm still going to have loads of seed and uncountable numbers of seedlings next year, but still -- I hate wasting seeds!

My driveway hasn't looked this clean since spring though:

I have to remember not to walk around out here barefoot now. The new nails they use have a bright blue collar around them so they're easy to spot, but the old nails, well, they just blend right in. There's no way that they found all of them, regardless of how many passes with the magnet broom they did!

I'm glad that I had this work done at the end of the summer and not when everything was still fresh. Although that would have given things time to rebound...

So what it comes down to is: work crews mean trouble for your plants!


To be honest, I'm not sure how many of these pots I would have moved or staked for protection had I thought about it earlier. Seems like a lot of work...

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