Category Archives: Home & Family

Between professional duties, I have been creating a garden around my new porch. This has required days of digging – both to remove concrete, boulders, brick fragments, wood, nails, wire and trash from the dirt and to add compost to improve the soil. Most of the bushels of concrete bits I dug out were hand-sized or smaller, with a few the size of my head. The big surprise was an exceptionally heavy boulder, more than twice the size of my head, which for some reason was sunk deep in the planting bed. It took an hour to dig around it enough to pry up an edge, then roll it out without cracking the PVC water pipe it was nestled against.  I dug through old patches of sand, concrete rubble, sawdust, and clay from the various uses to which this ground has been put since 1930.  Other than ornamental rocks, the only item I discovered worth keeping was half a fork with a drilled end, probably part of an old wind chime.

The major plants I put in are drought-resistant and should do well in our hot San Jose California summers:

1. Phormium (“Pink Stripe” and “Black Taya” New Zealand Flax)
2. Lavandula (“Goodwin Creek” and French Lavender)
3. Rosemary (prostrate)

Ground covers include Dymondia and Blue Fescue. The only plant to survive the construction (and heavy-booted construction workers) is the Meyer Lemon which seems much happier since we took away the fence and vine that were next to it.  I hope we get more rain to help settle the new plants before the weather gets much warmer.

January 2013:

December 2012:

July 2012:

Images Copyright 2012-2013 by Katy Dickinson

The breakfast bar tile was installed this morning on our new porch in Willow Glen, California.  This was the last major work to be done. I am very proud of our creation. My husband and I designed a completely new space (with much-appreciated advice from friends, relations, and professionals) and it came out beautifully. Best of all, the addition looks like it was always part of our 1930 house.  Our son Paul is already using it to work on his art.  As the weather gets warmer, I am sure the porch will become our preferred location for informal meals. I am half done installing the new planting bed in the garden around the new foundation. So glad to be done with contractors!

Here is what the same space looked like in July 2012:

Images Copyright 2012-2013 by Katy Dickinson

The minute we stop maintaining our gardens, the ravages of wind, snow, ice, droughts, floods, weeds, pests, and diseases transform them into something we never imagined. Basically, there’s no such thing as a “natural” garden, even one that consists entirely of native species. Much as we might like to deny it, nature abhors the garden.
– Peter Del Tredici, “Pacific Horticulture” magazine July-Sep 2001 issue

I spent time on-and-off today watching a Daveytree pruning crew taking two years’ growth off my garden forest. They did a good job and with minimal damage pruned: 2 big Coast Live Oaks, 2 big Modesto Ash trees, 3 Mimosas (silk trees), 2 big Olive trees, and a dozen or so yuccas. They trimmed the small apricot, apple, and white peach trees in our little orchard and covered the ground with chips from today’s pruning. The crew removed a privet (to the extent which that is possible – privets being almost unkillable) to make more space for my baby Coast Live Oak. The arborist also consulted on my poor pear tree which has fire blight but is probably going to live if I keep it clean. I did not have any work done on our dozens of cottonwoods or the 3 pepper trees living in the Guadalupe River (squirrel-central). A vast amount of extra wood and brush came off today.

Like many exercises in hygiene, the result looks tidy but not impressive. It seems that a tree can be negative (messy, unhealthy, mis-shapen, in the wrong place) but a well-pruned tree just looks normal. As Lewis Carroll’s Red Queen said:

…it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

Expected but a little disappointing.

Image Copyright 2013 by Katy Dickinson