THE COURTYARD GARDEN

While I like the location of my house and garden, if I could change anything it would be the distance that the house is from the road and also from my next door neighbor. Our house sits on a two acre lot, but the person who built it located it about 30 feet from the road. True, he did create a berm, which is an overgrown mess at the moment, but with all that land why would you put the house right on the road? Then there's the next door neighbor. He's about 20 feet away from the north side of our house. Not only that, when we moved in there was no fence between the properties. The neighbor's dog regularly made visits to our back yard to do his business until finally they put up a fence. Unfortunately, they put the type of fence you would place around a corral, which offered no privacy to speak of but does do a good job of keeping horses out of our yard.

The previous owner had also poured a long slab so he could park his RV behind the house and hook it up to the septic tank and electricity. We made the best of an ugly situation by setting up a basketball hoop when the kids were young and using the space for an outdoor court. However, the kids finally grew up and left home and the ugly slab seemed like it had outlived it's usefulness. When the Seattle earthquake struck in the late 90s the slab cracked in several places and became not only ugly, but also uneven. So finally we got sick of the lack of privacy and the ugly slab and decided to do something about it.

The first thing that had to go was the ugly slab. We decided to retain the part that wasn't cracked as bad, which coincidentally also supported part of the deck. I dealt with the rest of the slab by hiring my son to use a jack hammer to break up the concrete and then to haul the rubble to the back of the property. Once the concrete was gone I had some top soil hauled in to fill the area that the concrete had occupied. I then hired a Bobcat from the local equipment rental company and used it to spread the top soil, which turned out to be a big mistake, which I didn't discover until much later. The adventures of my Bobcat driving day is a whole story in itself, which I will save for another occasion. Let me just say that it involves an attempt to dig a pond and a very large wasp nest.

At any rate, the courtyard is nearly complete. it's taken three years more or less and more money than I anticipated, but we are pleased with the outcome. Of course, it's turned out different than I planned, but circumstances dictated that we make some changes. When I began, I wanted to build a pond, which could be seen from the living room and enjoyed from the patio. I began digging and discovered that once you got past the fill dirt I had brought in, there was hard pan, which had to be broken up before it could be loaded into a wheelbarrow. At some point I began thinking, "Do I really want a pond if I have to hand dig the whole thing?"

At that point I decided on a water feature rather than a pond. I found a piece of basalt which had a concave top and decided it would make a perfect bird bath. Water would be pumped up from a hidden reservoir through a bamboo pipe and trickle over the side and back into the reservoir. Moving a several hundred pound rock into place forced me to do come creative thinking. At the landscape supply yard the man merely picked the rock up with a fork lift and put in in the bed of my truck. I had thought that if I could get it out of the truck and onto the ground I could pick it up with a heavy duty hand truck designed to carry up to 800 pounds. In order to get it out of the truck I used an engine hoist belonging to my son. I wound a chain around the rock and hoisted it up, drove the truck out from under it and set it on the hand truck. I then discovered that I couldn't even budge the hand truck and if I had managed to get it moving, it would have sunk up to the axle in the soft dirt. So I hoisted the rock back up, pulled my tractor and wagon under the rock and lowered it into the bed of my little wagon. I was able to pull the wagon around and into position and then had to drag the engine hoist over, hook it up to the rock again and lower it into place. I was really pretty proud of myself. Of course, if I hadn't built the fence before I placed the rock I could have used a Bobcat to lift the rock and to do a lot of digging and eventually hauling gravel, but that's one of those things you learn by doing.

One plant that I definitely wanted in the courtyard was bamboo. We made a trip to Jade Mountain Bamboo down near Puyallup and bought a Phyllostachys aureosulcata f. spectabilis, which was recommended by the owner as a fine specimen plant for a courtyard. It was a great pick! In spring it puts out the most spectacular culms, which are purple and lavender. Some culms also have a tendency to bend, so that here and there are shoots with a crook in them.

Of course, the man also mentioned that you have to use an in ground barrier or else it would run all over the yard. We purchased 16 feet of heavy duty vinyl barrier, two feet wide. it was back to digging again as we began constructing a trench for the barrier. About 18 inches down we hit water, so a revision in plans was called for. We mounded the dirt up and then dug the trench. at this point we had one side of the planting area nearly a foot higher than the rest. Again we changed course and created raised beds on each side with a channel between. We covered the channel with gravel and rocks, constructing a dry stream bed leading from the basalt rock. It was finally beginning to look like something besides a mud hole.

Next, rocks were called for, so I spent a couple of days arranging and moving and rearranging rocks. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your point of view, this property has very few rocks available. At my last house, all you had to do was dig a bit and you would strike rocks, some of them as big as automobiles. Here, all you strike is clay and sand. A friend of my wife wanted to get rid of some rocks at the new house they had bought, so we went over after work and picked up a load of rocks. That was still not enough, so it was off to visit the man at the landscape yard and I purchased some special rocks, (at least they must be special since they cost so much) to complete the job.

I have always admired Japanese gardens, so the plants I selected reinforced the look. We added a dwarf Azalea (White Moon), a Prostrate Canadian Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis 'Coles Prostrate'), a fern (I moved these around so much I can't remember what I ended up with), and some grass (Hakonechloa macra 'Aureola') for a total of five main plants. The ground cover presented another problem. I wanted something that looked like moss, but it had to thrive in the sun most of the day. I looked and looked and finally found a plant at the West Settle Nursery known popularly as Australian Astroturf (Scieranthus biflorus). It fits the bill perfectly, although it got hammered by a week in December of sub-freezing temperatures last winter. Still, it survived and will hopefully fill back in the part killed by frost.

With the planting completed , we stood back and admired our work. It looked great until we turned and looked at the other end of the courtyard next to the house. it would take another year of digging and moving dirt, hauling in gravel and sand and finally setting pavers, to complete the courtyard.

I have just finished setting plants in the beds around the pavers this past week. The plants for this section called for some creativity. One side has sun from the south for most of the day and is planted with, a Mexican Blue Palm (Brahea armata), Dwarf Agapanthas, Ornamental Orgegano (Origanum r. 'Kent Beauty'), a passion flower vine (Passiflora incarnata), and Honeysuckle vine (Lonicera sp.) The end next to the house bakes in western sun all afternoon and the soil is sand and gravel. It is planted with Sempervivums and a dwarf Cistus, all of which love the heat, don't mind the poor soil and are drought tolerant. The side next to the deck is in deep shade almost all day. It features Black Mondo Grass (Ophiopogon lilaceae), Himalayan maidenhair fern (Adiantum venustrum), a Calla Lily - Green Goddess (Zantedeschia aethiopica), a Persicaria and a Peltaboykinia watanabei.

There remain some finishing touches, such as a gate (who would have thought finding a gate would be so difficult?) some lighting etc, but we are enjoying the courtyard garden even more than we expected and can hardly wait until summer when we can spend more time out there.

Finally, a big thanks to my wife, Joyce, who spent numerous hours helping me dig, dig, dig, and to my son, James, who was drafted on summer afternoon to help with what else, digging.