Our back yard below the old dog pen has never been "landscaped" . There are piles of firewood from the last big ice storm that felled lots of trees. We cleaned up some fallen trees and limbs and that is about all we have ever done. In the shade of the trees, plants grow sparsely and our worst weed is the Himalayan blackberry (Rubus armeniacus). Over the years I have noticed it does not grow in the shade and after deep shade forms the blackberries die out. My brother was logger for awhile and he took me to a grove of old growth Douglas Fir. I thought we would have hack our way through a dense jungle of plants there. Instead, the ground between the huge trees was almost barren and walking anywhere among them was very easy.
