Landscaping at Number 42

The sprinkler system is in:

Olivier has now finished removing all of the old lawn and he’s levelled the land.

The border for the driveway is now in place, and the future flower beds by the steps are also done.

Everyone’s been incredibly patient with my demands throughout, which is excellent. I know I sometimes come up with ideas that aren’t that easy to execute. Drawing out the curve for the driveway took a whole day because we started with perfect semi-circle measurements and then had to compensate because perfect measurements don’t always look perfect to the human eye (visual illusions). Now the measurements are a bit off, but it looks visually correct.

The mason was great and understood what I wanted very quickly. I asked him to keep in mind this was an old house, so I wanted him to incorporate defects where they’d be were the borders 100 years old. A bit of movement of earth, somewhere where someone drove over it and so forth. Later I’m going to stain the borders with iron sulfate.

Tomorrow the gardener begins laying the new turf. He says that’ll be done in two days. Then he’ll order the new plants I want. Italian cypresses of the stricta variety will feature heavily as will white gardenias. There’s a variety that resists frost well called the Crown Jewel.