According to legend, the man who built this house died in this courtyard. Well, technically, he’s the man who oversaw its most recent renovation; the core of the house is almost 75 years old, and on plans for the renovations we found in an old drawer, the courtyard appears to have been a swimming pool. Regardless, when he passed, this big, rambling old house soon became too large for his widow, who moved out, leaving it empty for quite a while, enabling us to get it for a steal during the pandemic.
While we wouldn’t have turned down a swimming pool – we were actually more concerned with getting away from the drought and the fires and the burning than we were about where we were moving to, other than “big enough for an art studio and a library” – we much prefer the courtyard, which we’ve started calling “The French Quarter.” But the excellent design of this house – architecturally, most of the windows have an excellent view, and the landscaping slopes away from the house almost everywhere to keep it dry – has a few minor warts on it, including the courtyard: under the overhangs, nothing will live.
The feature that keeps the water away from the house – the landscaping and the big sofits – makes it hard for anything smaller than a bush to live. When we moved in, and put in that little sitting area using paving stones and chairs from my late mother’s old garden, I dug up the monkey grass where I put in the paving stones, and used it to fill in the areas you now see filled with rocks. That grass lasted about a season, and by the next year, you couldn’t even tell anything had been planted there. It was just dust and weeds, and even the weeds frankly weren’t doing too well themselves and could have used a watering.
So, kind of in desperation, we hit on the idea of putting in more stream stone as a kind of a border, which the former owners had put around the fountain. This is something our termite folks have actually been asking us to do around the whole house to create a barrier, but we decided to get started here.
And I guess the surprise is that this stopgap effort looks really good. We sort of expected that it would have looked better than scraggly weeds and dead dirt, but, actually, it looks REALLY good, as if it was always supposed to have had a stone border around the outside.
I guess my point, if I did have one, is that sometimes you do things that you have to in order to patch a problem, but if you pick the right patch, sometimes it seems like it was on purpose.
-the Centaur
Pictured: um, well, I think I said it.
