In late August and September, I try to distract myself from the urge to plant as it's too early yet to count out further heatwaves in Southern California. I began the miserable task of cleaning up the back slope, which was nearly devastated by the combination of heat and severely restricted irrigation. I divided the ratty-looking
Arthropodium cirratum (Renga lilies) growing outside our living room window. I pulled every single orchid I own out of its pot, cleaned out the dead leaves and bulbs, and replanted each in fresh orchid mix. But the task that's given me the greatest sense of accomplishment thus far has been the extension of the rock wall running along the southwest side of our property.
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| Portion of the original retaining wall |
This dry-stacked wall has bugged me since we moved in more than 5 years ago. It runs parallel to the street behind our
Xylosma congestum hedge and turns east following the slope that descends from the main level of the front garden but the original wall terminated abruptly midway along that path.
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| View of the portion of the wall facing the street. The new Xylosma shrubs we planted to extend the existing hedge are doing fine but it will be at least a couple of years yet before they're large enough to close us off from the street. |
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| This is the corner where the wall turns east |
Early on, I began to extend the wall with stone and other bits of rubble.
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| The rubble I used to extend the original wall consisted of stray stones picked up from other parts of the property (which was part of a rock quarry in the 1940s), including decaying stones that crumbled under pressure, and chunks of cement left by a prior owner |
Needless to say, rubble doesn't make a very pretty - or solid - wall.
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| The end of my rubble addition to the wall was particularly pathetic |
I finally corralled my husband for a trip to the local stone yard. We brought home 1565 pounds of rock, matching our selection as closely as we could to the stone used to construct the original wall, which is no longer available. The weight severely taxed the transmission on my husband's pick-up truck but we made it home (slowly). Getting the stone off the truck was also a challenge as the rocks at the bottom of the pallet proved to be larger and far heavier than we'd imagined. Without my husband, there's no way I could have moved those rocks on my own.
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| It turns out that we had a ramp stored in the garage (which I often think of as my husband's equivalent of Mary Poppins' purse) |
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| This is about two-thirds of what we eventually unloaded |
I dismantled the rubble wall and he laid the largest stones for me. I filled in with the smaller stones and used the leftover rock to create planting pockets here and there along the slope's face. All the stones on the ground's surface were dug down into the soil several inches to ensure a solid footing and we backfilled behind them with imported soil.
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| The original wall stopped just behind that clump of Senecio vitalis shown roughly in the middle of this photo (below the large clump of Aeonium and the skinny pineapple gauva tree). The view here clearly shows the difference between the old stone and the new, although I'm not sure the casual observer on-site would immediately be aware of the difference. |
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| View of the extension from the dirt path leading from the main level of the front garden |
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| Planting pockets created on the slope's face around some of the existing plants |
I think I'd like to create more planting pockets but that will require another trip to the rock store. I'm going to live with what I've got for a while before investing in more stone. In the meantime, I'm planning to plant the "new" space with succulents. While some of these will be cuttings from elsewhere in my garden, I figure September isn't too early to do a little succulent shopping.
How about you? Have you got new projects going as we head toward autumn?
All material © 2012-2016 by Kris Peterson for Late to the Garden Party
