The backyard looked nice when we saw it during the realtor's Open House: a good place to barbeque and play with the cats. After we moved in, we kept the yard just as the former owners left it, through the first autumn and winter. Within a year, we began making changes.
We didn't like some of their color choices. No right or wrong about favorite colors, of course, but we gradually removed blues and pinks, while increasing reds, yellows, and oranges. We didn't like the single, spindley eucalyptus tree; an enthusiastic in-law took that down for us. Most of the fruit trees, in so small a yard, had to go to make room for beds of cut flowers, vegetables, and herbs.
As for the plants themselves, they all got bigger over time. Some looked better as they grew. Some had to go. Others, we pruned to change their shapes over the course of seasons.
The spaces that remained when we removed plants, we filled with other varieties more to our liking. Sometimes we simply let the remaining plants grow fuller.
The grass had to go. A lawn wants too much watering in our climate, and we just didn't have enough square feet to squander on ground cover. In the newly liberated space, we enlarged an existing perennial bed and added a new one. We let volunteer poppies, yarrow, lambs ear, and chrysanthemums bloom randomly in the pathways.
Today the back fence and the neighbor's house are nearly invisible. We harvest valuable things like lavender and white sage. Instead of a backyard, we have a garden.
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