Fresh Canvas

The house is gone!

The old house is now gone, and next week the excavation for the new foundation begins.  We have a big open space ready to take a new house.

Great example of stream with stones

The middle yard (between the main house and the guest house) will be part riparian plants in the shady areas and part meadow in the sunnier area.  Riparian? For those who are not Scrabble addicts, and would have to look it up, it means essentially “around the banks of a stream or river”…. well, there isn’t a stream on the property, but Adobe creek does run through the back all the properties across the street, and there is real water in it 9 months out of the year, so we thought that constructing a seasonal stream on the property that we kept full with our rainwater storage for part of the year and allowed to dry up for the other part of the year would then give us the climate to plant lots of columbine and other native California riparian species.   We saw some very inspiring examples of constructed streams in local California native gardens on the California natives tour (like this one at right from a stunning native plant garden in Palo Alto), so we are now looking at how much big rocks cost, and hoping that there are lots of them on Craigslist….