07 Late Winter - Top of the Hill Built At Last

Here is how the top of the hill looked after we finished building the terraces to the right of the staircase and across the top of the backyard. You can see they were constructed with boards, rebar and fence posts.

We spent a very long day hauling buckets of dirt up the hill to create the trail I'm standing on to take the photograph, and to create the little space in the distance, which is a nice place to sit and relax in the garden and gaze out at the Pacific Ocean on a non-foggy San Francisco day.

To make sure all the dirt didn't settle during our winter rainy season, we jumped up and down on it for quite some time - long enough, in fact, for a curious neighbor to ask what we were up to.

In this photograph, you can see pink ladies (amaryllis) and Mexican salvia, both of which were flourishing in the backyard long before we moved into the house.

To create the trail in the foreground, we had to dig up and move several pink lady bulbs, which were larger than your hands clasped together in prayer. The bulbs didn't like being disturbed, so we had very few flowers in the summer, 2007.