Yard For Art's Sake
October 11 , 2007

When is a yard not a back-breaking, labor-intensive exercise in utter frustration? It's not a riddle, it's a question Art Boy and I have been racking our brains to answer in our twenty-plus years of home ownership. And now, in this festive Open Studio season, we've finally come up with a solution: when the Universe gives you a yard, make art.

We always talked about the front yard, but we never did anything about it until this summer. The weeds, the mowing, the gopher colonies, the vast Celtic knotwork of crabgrass choking off the last few, brown, pitiful, blades of sod grass: it was a disaster area that would clearly require more than a couple of pots of geraniums from Home Depot to fix. We decided to adopt a Scorched Earth policy and start over again from scratch.

Little did we know. It took Art Boy two weeks to dig up the front yard all by himself, one shovelful at a time. For the first typically cold, foggy summer week, this worked out great. For the rest of the project, he worked every day in the extreme sunlight of our southern exposure as Santa Cruz settled into the balmiest, least foggy summer in living memory.

Then there was the problem of what to do with the dirt and debris he was digging up. A trailer we were borrowing didn't materialize for several days, so Art Boy started shoveling dirt into a pile at the front of the yard. It was like living behind a bunker. Soon, it resembled one of Richard Dreyfuss' crazed Devil's Tower sculptures in Close Encounters. Then it became Devil's Molehill, then Devil's Flatlands, as Art Boy re-shoveled all that dirt into the trailer (when it finally appeared) to be hauled away. There ought to be something very zen about the endless task of shoveling dirt, but don't ask Art Boy what it is.

Meanwhile, we found ourselves in a turf war with the gophers. The little buggers kept popping out of their holes to shake their little fists and mutter rodenty imprecations at this violation of their domain. Art Boy, generally a peaceable sort, got so riled by one of the little varmints, he took a whack at it with his shovel; he missed the critter, but managed to sever a pvc water line. The sound of one gopher laughing is not a pretty thing to hear.

While all the old sod was being hacked and hauled away, I spent days on my knees, pruning, weeding, watering and sweating, transferring some venerable old succulents and rose bushes into a holding bin to re-plant later. I just don't get that some people do this for fun. The fun part for us was heading out most afternoons to plant stores and nurseries (Sierra Azul in Watsonville, and Far West Nursery, right around the corner in Live Oak, were our favorites) to pick out things for the new yard.

Understand, neither of us are remotely what you'd call gardeners, let alone landscape designers. All we knew was that we wanted a rockscape: drought-tolerant and low maintenance (no mowing!), dressed up with a few hardy things that even I can't kill—curvy, furry, flowery Dr. Seuss-ian succulents, wild, spiny cacti, sunburst shrubbery, which we began to amass in pots on the back deck, optimistically hoping to keep them alive long enough to plant out front.

We started planting after Art Boy covered every inch of yard with weed guard and gopher wire. Nothing if not meticulous, he also made his own gopher wire baskets for every single new plant. The first thing we put in was a row of flowering cannas along the side fence. (To the relief of our neighbors, who were beginning to wonder if an empty dirt lot was our idea of low maintenance.)

To break up the monotony of a flat yard, Art Boy piled up what we came to call the Indian burial mound mid-yard, on which to isolate the most prickly, user-unfriendly cacti. We lined the walkway with boisterous flowering succulents in colorful ceramic pots. Then we put in our fantasy-landscape of wild things with names like "Kiwi Cheer," "Common Houseleek," and "Flapjacks." A dashing yucca tree we both fell in love with that no one else at the garden shop would touch turned out to be named "Spanish Bayonet." (At last, a plant that might be impervious even to me! At least this one won't go without a fight.) When we put in several agaves and a dwarf lime tree, I realized we were planting a margarita garden.

Finally, we went to Cabrillo Sand and Gravel to pick out our stone: a honey-blonde variety called "California Gold," half-inch size, small enough to crunch underfoot without requiring hiking boots (or hooves) to navigate. The piece-de-resistance were the eight uneven, hand-hewn cement stepping stones left behind by the house's original owner that Art Boy spray painted greeny-turquoise blue, which we set in an arc bisecting the yard. Crossing the stones to the house is like walking on pieces of sky.

Our hand-made yardscape took two months to build, a hefty chunk of pre-Open Studio time during which Art Boy was not painting. But who says art has to hang on a wall or perch on a pedestal? Sometimes art lives (we hope) right outside the front door.