Tuesday, June 1, 2010

Compare/Contrast

Thought I'd post a couple of side-by-side before-and-after shots of the landscaping...



Adventures in Landscaping, DONE!

Beautiful! Just like the other adults have! I especially like the way it smells now, with the bark all fresh and redwoody smelling. So here's what we got:

5 Japanese yew. These are along the far right fence and will eventually grow up to be great big strong windbreaks.

3 white birch. These are in the far right corner. Their role is to sway and bow gently in the breeze (wind) and look pretty.

5 non-tropical hibiscus. Four of them are in front of the white birch, one is behind those four, among the white birch.

13 oleander, the tall ones, a mix of pink and white. Four of these went towards the left, in front of the air conditioning units. We wanted something to protect them from the wind and give them some shade, and we also wanted to hide them onnacounta they're big and ugly. The remaining 9 are all in front of the Japanese yew, and will fill in below the leaf line.

7 cubic yards of bark (of which we had enough left over to fill in some holes we had in the front yard).

Purty!


Adventures in Landscaping, During

Some in-process shots of the work that was done. We had a total of 24 plants put into the ground . That means that these poor guys had to dig 24 holes into our awful, rocky, hard, rocky, clay, rocky, awful dirt... Eight 15 gallon-sized holes, and 5 gallon-sized holes for the rest. Plus trenching for the drip system and all the prep for the concrete. I felt sorry for the guy doing the bulk of the digging; I gave him a couple of bottles of water throughout the time he was here.


Adventures in Landscaping, Before

Yes, DH and I have decided to grow up. Well, at least as far as our home's landscaping is concerned. See, the month before we moved, in, DH lost his job (a high-risk mortgage company went under; great timing, huh?). We had enough to go for a while, but didn't want to deal with things we considered discretionary. Backyard landscaping fell into that category.

A few months after being in the house, and having been exposed to a very extreme Morgan Hill summer (incredible winds, temperatures over 100 degrees for two weeks in a row), when he got his next job, the first thing we did was put in some sod for most of the back yard. With such incredible winds, the house had continually full of dust and dirt. Yuck. We had hoped that the sod, in addition to looking nice, would cut down on the dirt factor.

Well, that worked; the amount of dust and dirt swirling around the house was cut 'way down. But we never felt comfortable enough financially to start to do anything 'fancy' with the rest of the landscaping. Oh, we put in those grapevines (8 went in, 6 are still alive; probably won't fruit this year), a blood orange tree (still doing okay), a Meyer lemon tree (ditto), and some jasmine bushes, but those were random acts of greenery, not a 'vision' of what we wanted the yard to look like.

Until now. We decided we had a few drachmas we could spend on the back yard and had gotten a good recommendation from a neighbor (hi, Suzy!). For comparison, we also invited another company to come and give us a quote, but not only was their quote higher, it was apparent that the owner didn't have quite the artistic vision that Le has. She listened to our woes ("oh, the wind!" "oh, the dirt!" "oh, how ugly!") and came up with a design that was simple, but elegant - and incredibly inexpensive, given the amount of work involved.

We opted to have her only do one side of the yard first, sort of a trial run (and to keep the costs down even more), so here are some of the sad before shots of the northeast side of our yard.