After a season the place started really shaping up, not manicured exactly, but I thought it suited my little rustic cottage, kind of charming in a raggedy sort of way. I had terraced rock gardens ascending the east hill of my property and I was truly happy looking at it. To me it was a three dimensional painting. And a place to stroll around and sigh with a glass of red wine in the evenings.I kept extending the boundaries and clearing more vinca, scrub oak and to my horror poison oak (Toxicodendron diversilobum)! Boy did I spend some miserable weeks learning that lesson. I was well acquainted with P.O. and had learned to avoid it but no one ever told me about the roots. Yup, I sat right in a root system that I had previously "round-upped" trying to extricate a beautiful rock and after a couple hours of low squat crow-barring, I was in a world of prickly hurt…you know where.
Once that was over I got back on the horse but realized I was running out of rocks. I had been using the broken concrete I had laying around for stepping stones but then uncovered some ancient flat Bouquet Canyon stones that were extremely beautiful after I washed them off. They looked like fish skin to me, especially when they were wet, gold sparkles and scalloped rusty veins. I started building a path and then it hit me, I wanted a stone patio. Someplace flat on this 45ยบ hill! I unburied about 20 stones but that wasn't going to do the job, I had to find some more. That broken concrete just wasn't going to cut it aesthetically now that I knew about B.C. Off to the building supply I went and found that for a lousy six hundred bucks I could get a pallet of it, 4 tons! Out came the credit card…
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