Land Escape

A few months ago, we decided that the six giant eucalyptus trees in our front yard had to go. Those six, asymmetrically planted behemoths that dotted the northern border of our otherwise featureless lawn were starting to get out of hand.

This was a tough decision. Neither of us are tree haters. In fact, my left-leaning, vegetarian-embracing education taught me that trees are inhabited by the souls of nature's wisest, gentlest guardians, so cutting one down was tantamount to throwing your grandma into a stump grinder.

Nevertheless, the damned things had to go. They were old, old and bushy. Not bushy in a harmless way, but bushy in the kind of way that tangles itself in electrical lines and hangs big plugs of leaf matter onto your roof, as if to grin and say, "Man, any of us ever catches on fire, you guys are SCREWED!"

The neighbors didn't like this idea of cutting the trees. That bothered us a lot, because we have a deep seated need to be liked and accepted by our neighbors. So we waffled a lot about it. At one point we were just going to trim them; another time we'd decided only to cut down a few and leave the others.

But then this winter happened. And every time a wind storm arrived, and we watched these big, rickety trees sway back and forth against our house, I'd imagine one of them tipping over and crashing into my daughter's bedroom at 3am. "Everyone in the neighborhood new one of those trees would go, sooner or later," someone would tell a news reporter. I WAS NOT GOING TO LET THAT HAPPEN.

So we removed the damn things, every one of them. What we were left with was a boring grid of lawn, dotted with large brown splotches where a tree had previously been. No flowers; few plants. One sad little concrete walkway, leading up to an equally sad stoop, both painted dark red so that, from a few blocks away, they might convince someone that they were brick.

It was time for a change.

So we did it. And we did it right. We researched many landscape designers, settling on one company that our neighbors highly recommended and who really seemed to know what they were talking about. (Eco-Landscape in Valley Village in case you're wondering.)

One thing we kept in mind as we worked out the design was: Let's Do This Once, and Let's Do it Right. In other words, we wanted to respect our budget, but we also wanted to get the most possible out of that budget. The wishlist we presented them with was enormous.

It included brick pathways, extending from the (real brick) front stoop down to the driveway and then also down to the street, finally curving around beneath Sadie's window to create a little bricked sitting area.

We asked for them to figure out a way to widen our narrow driveway without compromising the design, and they came up with a warm, rusty flagstone that blended beautifully into the brickwork.

We asked for as many California native plants as possible, and where those wouldn't work, we asked for plants requiring minimal water. On top of that, I begged them to avoid all of those archetypical desert plants -- cactus, spiny, pokey stuff -- that to me, send more of a message of "get away, I will stab you" then one of "Welcome to our home."

The landscapers went away and came back with a beautiful plan. We looked at that plan. We said "oooh," a lot. And, to make a long story short, we eventually told them that our lawn was their playhouse and they should treat it as such.

That was three weeks ago, and since then they've been working their asses off in our front yard every single day. Sadie is so used to the sawing and the machinery and the truck engines now that they don't even wake her up from her daily nap.

Today, they finally finished the hardscape and put in the plants. And this...this is pretty close to how it's eventually going to look. It looks like a real garden.

When you look at this picture, imagine a table and chairs sitting on the brick beneath Sadie's front window. The oval area directly in front will be seeded, and grass will eventually fill it in. The purple plum will become a pretty, sweet-shade giving tree in the corner, and the Sycamore, in a few decades, will tower over most of the other trees on our block.