This was fun.

First of all, at Home Depot when I went to load the 12 bags of top soil into my car, I discovered this guy:

Thinking that there were too many ways for him to come to grief in his current setting, I scooped him up and brought him home.  There was a moment of panic when I carefully unloaded the car and he wasn’t there—what if he had decided to burrow under the seats and die?—but I found him and as you can see he’s fairly content to be my friend.  He finally leapt to my shoulder and from there to the hostia by the southpoint.  I haven’t seen him since, but he should be fine.

You will recall from yesterday that I had begun the mini-terrace at the southwest corner.

I decided to lower the far range of blocks so that the border bricks were all on one level.  I could have done that by dismantling the whole thing and digging a deeper foundation, but I found it easier just to replace the concrete blocks with others half their height.

After I got the whole thing walled in and filled in, I stepped back and took a good look at it.

Those who know the Lichtenbergianism process know that it’s time for GESTALT and SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION.  My thinking was that the sinuous outline of the terrace was lame.  It did not resonate.  Its woo factor was pitifully low.

So I fixed it.

Still some adjusting to be done—brick-cutting, etc.—but on the whole I think it’s much better.

Long shot:

I am halfway considering paving that circle around the tree with flagstones like the fire pit and the back corner, but that won’t be until the spring.

I also have concerns that the brick edging is precarious: a slight misstep will knock them off.  If I weren’t so averse to permanence I’d cut them to fit and then cement them in place.  Oh well, if that becomes necessary at some point in the future, we can do that.

Next up: the back corner.

Back at work on the Great Labyrinth Reclamation Project, this time on the southwest corner.

You may recall that the new fence, in cutting a straight line from one corner to the other, cut off some of my “landscaping” at the far end of the labyrinth, and so I am having to revamp that corner.  It’s always been problematic in that the bricks that I used to create a border were continually being covered over by soil washing down the little slope there.

So my plan is to build a small wall and fill that in with dirt.

Here’s the bottom layer of wall:

And more:

I didn’t buy quite enough blocks, so back to Home Depot today.  I will also buy the fill dirt to put in there and then seed it.

Meanwhile that back corner will become a nook of some kind:

I already had two large pieces of fieldstone, so I went ahead and put them down.  I’ll get to this area later this week.

Onward!

I bought a timer for the sprinkler last week—none of the timers I had bought previously worked, of course—and so the labyrinth was watered while I was on Lichtenbergian Retreat last weekend.  When I got home on Sunday, I went to check on things and was astonished to find:

The grass seed has already sprouted!

Now to keep it alive for another four weeks…

Step 4: Improve the walkway

Years and years and years ago, before there was a labyrinth, before there was anything in the back yard but weeds, I created a walkway.  It has remained a constant no matter what else has happened in the area.

After we put in the patio two years ago, I re-landscaped it with mulch and all that jazz, but that has never been quite satisfactory.  The mulch drifts, and it looks messy.  So now I’m taking steps to contain the mulch:

The majority of the work was creating a trench for the dwarf mondo grass.  The ground is so dry and hard that I used a trencher to cut through the soil, then again to create a parallel cut.  I watered it to soften it, waited, then went back over it with two different shovels, watering and scraping the whole time.  It was tedious.

I also wondered at the ethics of a construction grading firm who—twenty years previously—blithely bulldozed all the construction detritus into what was surely going to be a landscaped back yard.¹

I also also wonder at The Home Depot, where I bought out their entire stock of dwarf mondo grass (six flats), and the nice lady watering the plants asked if I would be needing more.  I cheerfully replied, “Maybe, but you certainly will.”

Getting the mondo into the ground was easy: plop the plant into the trench, cover.

“People” will tell you that mondo grass is easy, that you plant some and it will “spread” and “fill in.”  These “people” are lying.  It never does.  There was a small patch near the downspout by the patio for twenty years, and it never grew nor spread.  Never.

So if I want to further fill in the path with mondo, I will have to buy it and plant it.  That should keep me busy until my mid-70s at least.

In other news, you may have seen the video on the FaceTubes about the cool little metal triangle that all manly men should have to cut lumber and/or pipe.  It slices, it dices, it’s better than a Veg-O-Matic.  I bought one last month and yesterday I got to use it for the first time.

One of the great pleasures of being alive is when something like this is everything that is claimed for it.²   Where was this device during all those years of set building at the theatre??

I used it to cut a board to insert into the fence along the patio, because of course the lighting fixture we’ve been holding for a couple of years, waiting on a new fence, is too big to fit between the rails but too small to attach to the rails.

One more thing: a huge task on my GLRP checklist was to dig up the underground speakers and figure out why they had stopped working.  I figured I would at least have to buy new speakers; I hoped I wouldn’t have to dig up the cables as well.

I plugged in my little marine amp (not all-weather, just weather “resistant”) and plugged in the iPad and the speakers, just to be ready to test.  Lo! the far speaker, down where until last week there were ferns (::sigh::) began playing.

Great, I thought, only one speaker to dig up.  I began to pull up the bricks that I had laid around the speaker to slow down the ivy.  As soon as I touched the second brick—THE SECOND BRICK, KENNETH—the speaker came on.  This is after months of not producing sound of any kind.

I chalked it up to living a virtuous life and replaced the brick.

…to be continued…

—————

¹ I don’t have to wonder at all.  I remember the day: I had arrived home from school to find the bulldozer guy grading the entire back yard into a slope down to the retaining wall despite the contract to create two levels.  I stopped him, told him he was doing it wrong, he said he knew nothing about it and started back up.  I stopped him again and told him rather acerbically that either he could call his boss and find out the specifics, or he could finish the job and then I would call his boss and he would have to re-do the entire yard.  He rather sensibly chose the former.

² Another thing that performs equally well is the Sonos sound system.  It’s awesome when you can have every speaker in the house playing a different station and can control all of them from your phone or iPad or computer. But I digress.

Step 3: Reclaim the southwest corner

Yesterday I began reconstructing the southwest corner.

The problem is that the new fence was designed to cut straight from one neighbor’s fence on the right to the other neighbor’s shed on the left—and the original chain link fence hugged the retaining wall before jogging over to the shed.  Hence, I lost two–three feet of landscaping, as seen here:

There is actually one of my ferns on the other side of the fence now (which, it just dawned on me, I can go dig up and move…) I’m also missing several cherry laurel saplings which framed the westpoint bowl rather nicely.  Oh well.

The area’s been problematic anyway: the slope of the ground there means that the bricks are always being covered with dirt washing down the hill. It’s impossible to grow grass there, and the battle with the ivy and the thorns is never-ending.  So revamping it is a net plus, actually.

First, take up all the bricks:

Here’s what I’m thinking: define an extension of the mostly level labyrinth area, build a mini-retaining wall, fill in the space with dirt, re-establish the brick edging.

Install some stone steps leading down to that back corner and resurface it with paving stones, perhaps as a little sitting nook?

I’ll let this sit for a couple of days to see how it grows on me.