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.
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