Landscaping With Rocks

We have cleared a lot of overgrown plants away from the Buddha, who was disappearing into the undergrowth.  Dan and Tobi brought their dog, Trixie, to dinner on Friday evening and when she went outside exploring and started  barking Dan went out to find out what was happening. He found her having a standoff with the Buddha. Once Dan convinced her that Buddha was a pacifist, and also a carved rock, she relaxed and continued her investigations....

Now that he has come out of the bushes, I was able to take his picture through the living room window.

We're still working on the spaces left when we took out two huge streletzias. I didn't really want to plant anything else there but we spent a few days trying to figure out what to do about the bare dirt. Eventually we moved Kermit, a large frog shaped pot with an aloe 'hat' into one space. He has turned very dark over the years and sort of disappeared into the shadows, so I decided to put light colored river rocks around him. 

We have a ton of these smooth, rounded rocks which covered practically every inch of dirt when we moved here. It was impossible to plant anything new or even walk without moving rocks out of the way,  or kicking them out of the spaces between the cement slabs in the walkways. Now some are forming borders around the planting beds and the rest are stashed away in buckets. I can't even estimate how many times we have painstakingly moved all the rocks every time a new plan evolved. 

I struggled to figure out how to get down to the ground in order to place the rocks, experimented with sitting, kneeling and bending over but couldn't move the bucket of rocks once I had filled it. At the end of the day sitting out there with wine, I decided I didn't like it, so today began the whole process again. I did have to enlist John to dump the bucket of rocks and bring it back for me to fill again. He wanted to get back to fixing the irrigation, but cooperated grumpily. 

One iteration of our landscaping efforts involved picking up every single rock, buckets and buckets of them, and dumping them in an unseen corner of the property, but somehow some of them always seem to migrate back to the garden, which is where they are now, forming borders. 

And I am hoping that the Chameleon Plant, a pretty little ground cover which has sprung up everywhere, will cover this space without trying to grow into the house. It may turn out to be just as much trouble as the rocks as it is quite aggressive. It continues to grow in there every time we take it out so we may as well give in to it. It makes a nice change from rocks...for now.