Curb Appeal
Every day I wake up with some new idea that I cannot believe I haven’t had before. Now that Ive taken care of all the currently necessary fixes and maintenance of my property, I’m free to innovate and improve as I see fit. I started out thinking that I needed to take three approaches to the property. There was the front that had been heavily planted with a vast variety of cacti and succulents. It is considered by some to be an award-winning succulent garden. My job with that was to try not to screw it up since it was a highlight of the house. The second was what I will call the living spaces, which are the spaces directly adjacent to the house where we have the patio and now the spa, the garden and the landscaping that directly surrounds the house, front ant back. I knew that I wanted to improve on those spaces because we would be using them and looking at then the most. The third area was the lower hillside, which was cut down for homeowners insurance purposes, but which was otherwise to be left in its natural boulder-strewn chaparral form.
I only followed that plan somewhat. I did maintain the front garden as I was supposed to. And I did spend my early efforts on the living spaces by putting in the spa, putting in two palapas (on the deck and on the patio) for shade and a proper shade sail over the parking area in front of the garage. Those were all great early investments. In fact, I contend that building in shade is about as sensible a thing as you can do for a home out here. I also reorganized the entire area surrounding the garage. The East and South sides were overgrown and a bastion for the local snakes and critters and the West side was trash can central, and quite visible to guests coming in the kitchen door. I cleared out all around the garage and moved the trash cans to the less visible East side, where I also put down pebbled concrete pavers to keep everything clean. I also replaced an old plastic overgrown shed on the South side, which blocked access around the back of the garage altogether, with a wooden shed for garden tools and still left access once I opened up the area and rid it of the snake hiding places. As for the back hillside, well, I started by leaving it alone…
By this time, my efforts on the back hillside are somewhat legendary around here. I’m not sure what changed my opinion about what needed to happen on that hillside, but I have now turned almost 90% of the hillside into a planted, irrigated and increasingly lush garden with bursts of color all year long from the combination of more succulents, drought-tolerant plants and native California flowers and bushes. I have included two California Wildflower gardens that are magnificent year-round. And the entire hillside is now accessible by a series of wending pathways, accented with planted pots and interesting metal sculptures including my infamous Bison Boulder statue, not to mention the Hobbit House. As the year wound down in 2022, I felt like my back hillside efforts were at an end as the only things left undone were beyond eyesight. So perhaps it was time to stop and enjoy the gardens as they were.
And then things changed again. As the spring season came and the garden flowers bloomed far more colorfully than in years past, I began to notice that the front of the house gardens were looking less well-tended and specifically a bit too natural. Most of the homes around here, regardless of what sort of garden they choose, have curbs against the road that define their garden from the street. And most of the curbs are decorative California golden stone set in concrete. As I walk around our neighborhood, those curbs always strike me as too contrived, like the houses you see on the hillside that stick out rather than blend in. I’ve always been happy that our home seems to fade into the hillside more than it stands out. Among the homes in our neighborhood, there are two approaches most noticeable. There is the fully manicured landscaping and the native and natural landscaping. Our yard is one of the more notable for its succulent proliferation and it is decidedly not all natural (my friend Mike likes to say I seem to get more rain than the rest of the neighborhood, which his ways of saying I water too much). I love our front succulent gardens and it is commented on by everyone who sees it, so I wouldn’t change a thing. But the intersection of the yard and the road left a lot to be desired. That was the thing I had overlooked and then suddenly couldn’t look past this year.
Our front garden by the road is dominated by agave attenuatas and a few tree aeoniums and a pride of Madeira plant. But the road just blends into the garden with a gaggle of weeds. The nice thing most of the year is that the weeds that seem to prefer our garden and roadside are sweet alyssum, which is a floxy white-flowered weed that is often mistaken for intentional ground cover. You start by appreciating the sweet alyssum, thinking maybe you’ll just leave it there, and then it starts to do one of two things you don’t like. First and foremost, it grows so quickly and so thick that it engulfs the cacti. It can hide a big barrel cactus in its midst in two or three days of growth. That crowding out starts to interfere with the look you were going for with the purposefully placed cacti. The other thing is that the sweet alyssum doesn’t age any better than any of us do and when it gets leggy and starts browning out, you very quickly recognize it for the weed that it really is.
This all has made me decide that going full natural at the curb is not the best approach for us. Rather than do something more elaborate, I have taken a chapter out of my predecessor’s book. She had placed larger black river rocks along the edge of the driveway to create a border. I like that look even though the black rock does not look as though it comes from this property. I think its OK to make it look intentional and, to a certain extent, that makes it look more purposeful and defining, which is the whole point of a border. So, I bought three tons of black 8-10” black river rock (called pineapples) and had it dropped off at the base of the driveway. My intention was to have Omar or Joventino plant them along the road, but one thing led to another and I ended us spending three days doing it myself. It really wasn’t so hard since I wasn’t using any cement. I say that now, but I assure you that every day at quitting time I would haul my sorry ass up to the shower and sit there soaking my head in the warm rain wondering why I was doing this to myself. It involved using a pickaxe to dig a trench along the road, hauling one cart’s worth of pineapples to that spot and placing then lengthwise in the trench. I then filled in around the rocks and raked the mulch back and voila, I had a new rounded curb that would pop nobody’s tires if they pulled up onto them. I then bought some small ⅛” pea gravel and put it down to better blend the asphalt into the black pineapples. If I do say myself, I think it looks fantastic.
In the residential real estate game, a game that has been dominant here in California for a long time, everyone talks about curb appeal. I think what they intend by that expression if how the house looks on the surface from the curb, but who knows. Maybe it also matters if you curb is also appealing. I have no plans to sell this house for a long time yet, but all things eventually come to pass and I want to make sure my curb does not curb anyone’s enthusiasm for the place.