Coming out my kitchen door to the breezeway and back patio, one sees two beds. To the east and south of the patio is an herb garden, and to the west is a bed that hasn't changed significantly since I move to the house in May 2013. I call that the Myrtle Bed because it is dominated by a tall crepe myrtle. The patio separates the two beds.
Looking out from the patio, you see the open expanse of the yard, of which the primary feature is the main garden, with its six beds. The garden takes up much of the eastern two thirds of the yard.
I lightly manage the rest of the yard, often in support of the garden:
- the west fence area
- the back fence area
- the east fence area
- the processing area
- the mini lawn
- the bedroom wall area
On the east side of the house, behind the fence that separates the front and back yards, is the back yard nook.
The wooden back fence is a couple feet inside the property line, which is demarcated by a chain-link fence. This leaves a thin strip of my property between the fences.
Three features that once had prominence in the back yard, the water oak circle, the arbor, and the jasmine strip, are now gone. I removed the jasmine strip over the first two years I lived here, and I removed the water oak circle and the arbor in early 2016.
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When I moved in to this house on May 15, 2013, the back yard was very open. It was moslty covered with St. Augustine grass, with a lot of star jasmine on the fences in the north-east and on the ground all along the back fence and the east fence. This photo shows the back yard from the southwest corner, by the back yard gate.
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Here is the opposite view, from the the northwest corner.
When I moved to this house, I brought some garden soil from the house I had been renting and put it in a pile on cardboard near the back yard gate.
For three months, I used the previous owner's lawn service. Otherwise, I didn't change the yard at all, except for creating a stick pile on the edge of the star jasmine patch near the north-east corner of the yard.
Shortly thereafter, I moved the soil I was keeping to my new garden bed, and when I moved the cardboard it had been on, I could see how the grass had been suppressed in that area. This would open up that space for a variety of other plants.
The first non-garden plant I added was Texas lantana, which I put in the northwest corner of the yard.
[A lot more to add to this story here...]
I took this panorama photo of my back yard from my roof on April 3, 2017.
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