Most recent update: July 3, 2025!
This picture of the front of the house shows the entry garden mid-spring 2004 with the medlar tree closest the door, the fig, and the butterfly bush at the corner soon after it was moved to that location. A little hard to see at this resolution are the lovely golden California poppies under the living room window and the purple irises between the fig and the corner of the house.
The wood chips were fairly new at the time, so didn’t have a lot of weeds growing in them yet!
This picture taken the following year from the opposite angle shows the exuberance of the weeds — from the lemon balm “melissa officinalis” to the kale that bolted and looked so pretty we left it — but doesn’t show the trees in the front of the house as well as the one from 2004. Notice the gardening tools next to, in front of and on the steps!
The above picture was taken in the Spring of 2006. You can see how much bigger and fuller everything seems. Can’t see the pretty bluebells under the medlar, or the pot of violets Grant put on the chair under the fig, but they are lovely. You can see a few more weeds in the bark, and how severely I cut back the butterfly bush this past winter…
The end of August 2006: the foliage of the fig tree almost obscures the house, the butterfly bush is back to size, the medlar has been trimmed back a bit from the driveway but still provides a nice screen and shade for the house.
And yet another view of the front of the house, this time in the snow. The clutter at the corner of the house by the yellow garbage can is construction debris from the roof repairs that are as of the end of November 2006 not yet complete. Soon…
And here we are again, March 2007: a few twigs and bits still to clean up, but already the daffodils are beginning to bloom, the irises have new green shoots, the rose has bright burgundy tips.
May 2008, it is finally getting warm (we had another fairly heavy frost just last week).
The medlar is fully engulfed in leaves, the bluebells around its base are tall and healthy. There are even large green buds on the fig tree! And yes, the metal arch I bought for the garden a year ago is still to the left of the front door, waiting for its permanent home.
There are more pictures from today in this regular blog post.
Four years later, on the last full day of winter 2012, and the ailments of three years’ neglect are showing..
From an overgrown hedge in front of the overgrown fig to the leaning medlar, clearly there is work to be done. But it’s nice to be having mature garden issues, and I am confident that a summer at home will allow us to remedy the most immediate issues. Two shots from today, the front of the house, and the side, with the large windows still waiting for frames for a greenhouse! Notice the height of the mountain huckleberry at the corner of the house! We harvest at least three cups of the tiny, precious purple fruit each year now. Planting things that thrive in the native soils is key – we barely do anything, other than weed around it once a year and prune branches that are too spindly.
On March 18, 2013, almost a year after the last image, our home burned. From the outside, at first it looked just as it did in the morning when I left. But as one looked longer, the broken glass in the living room window showed only blackness -bleakness- and there was soot on the wall underneath the window… coming up from the vent… here and there the firefighters had tossed something out the window as they put out the fire. I looked for a couple of pictures from that horrible day: there are none on my computer! But there are a few from later that year. You can see the soot and the board-ed up windows. And one pic of the living room, which was once sunny, cluttered, and comfortable.
Here is one of the new house before it was painted. I rather like that the unpainted color was similar to the old house… when we painted it almost seemed that instead of forgetting the year and forgetting the grief, we were repairing our lives.
2014 through 2025. July
It has been a VERY long time since I updated this page. We have been “home” for 11 years now, and a month (give or take). Building, finishing, living in, and maintaining the house alongside increasing disability (mine) has been interesting, to say the least.
At first, I was mostly mobile, and mostly capable. I continued to work on the yard and the vegetable garden, and started to work again on the garden with the goldfish pond. Grant, for his senior project, built a little patio by the pond, and for years I was able to enjoy sitting at a the little bistro set that survived the fire. As long as the grass was mowed, I could get there, first on my own, then with a cane, or crutches.
When I moved from those to a wheelchair at the end of summer 2019, it was no longer accessible. So, Grant built an extension to the entry porch to connect to a ramp, and then we hired someone to finish the ramp and enlarge the original patio a bit.
Similarly, the entrances and exits to the house itself were accessible “enough” until I ended up in a wheelchair, and suddenly the 1″ thresholds were insurmountable. A couple of mobile (plastic) ramps for inside, an aluminum ramp to go out the dining room door, and a nice thick entry mat outside the front door made a huge difference. As an aside, what works for manual wheelchairs and electric wheelchairs is not always the same! The entry ramps work well enough for all types of mobility (and moving heavy things in and out!), but the smaller wheels on the electric chairs make that type of chair less-effective on uneven or soggy ground.
Still, with help, and patience, I have been able to get outside and work in “my” garden spaces regularly until the last few years, when, post-lockdowns I was exhausted teaching through a mask (21-22), nearly quit from stress caused by a situation at school (22-23), caught covid early in the school year (23-24) which turned into long covid… Three summers when I simply couldn’t make any progress, or even maintain, my gardens. Even with help…
Except that I was able to get some help between 2022 and 2024 to finally spread the remaining soil from re-doing the pond garden (2020) and make the long-anticipated flower bed in the front! We planted seeds, the hydrangea, and a few perennials from various nurseries and moved both Siberian and Bearded irises. Tom started cosmos in the greenhouse to transplant, and in 2024 Grant helped plant a lot of things on Mother’s Day. Later that year I saw a BEAUTIFUL yellow birdbath, and we put it in place. The garden ages well through the seasons, with dusty miller providing silvery foliage all year round and a few other perennials staying green. The volunteer ferns at the far end (closest to the ornamental maple) are accompanied year-round by loves mosses and other native ground covers between the plants.
This gallery shows some of the progress in the front garden through the last few years. A description of this year is below!
A gift from my parents for our anniversary this year resulted in a trip to the local garden center (formerly Bark and Garden, now Watson’s). We picked up “a few” items, including two sculptures. A lovely wind-powered dragonfly sculpture that I placed near the birdbath (it has bells!), and a ceramic “koi” to put by the fish pond. We added in several baskets sold as a fundraiser for a teen neighbor, and waited for last year’s survivors to appear. We have not been disappointed! Almost all of the snapdragons, sweet William, monarda, sweet alyssum, phlox, and mallows survived. The walking onions were there all winter. The small feverfew that we kept (otherwise it takes over) returned, a daisy volunteered, and I discovered the gladiolus bulbs in time to get them into pots for this year (need to make critter-proof underground baskets…). It is already a glorious riot of color, and such a joy to come home to!
The pond garden? Here are a few pics. I only “blew off” the debris from fall and winter yesterday, and need to get working on tidying the beds and adding a few replacement plants. As well as putting up the feeders again.
As for the back garden, it’s in process. Here are two pics. The first is taken early in June when we were just beginning to think about what and where. The second is from the opposite end of the patio, showing placement of most of the structural pieces and the rose arbor in full bloom.
And a bonus picture, showing the top of the tower (behind the umbrella in the second pic above). The petunias were given to me by my “secret pal” they were extras from a project her class did in May.
