Since we moved into our house last year, I’ve been trying to mold the pathetic little plot of Earth my family lives on into something presentable. It has been one backbreaking trial after another. If you’ve ever seen our yard, you know the best thing for it would be to ask God to start over. It’s a crumbling hillside, dropping thirty feet from the back of the house to a pond. Somebody has built several retaining walls out of wood and stone, all of which are seconds from total failure. Daylilies and Hosta sprout from every crack, in full battle with some of the worst weeds in the world, Bindweed and Japanese Knotweed. Grapevines and ancient roses look on from their precarious perch. Above another wall that holds back the driveway, which I might add is on the wrong side of the house, a garden of stuff I actually want grows hidden from the world under overgrown oak trees. Peonies, Iris, Sedum and Lilac.

And the stones. Granite stones are everywhere! I can’t put a shovel in the ground without hitting something hard, and it usually turns out to be a brick, a cobblestone, or a chunk of concrete. Somebody saw fit to bury these things long ago, where they could be found by my lawnmower blades. So I’ve been digging them up, only to discover that they look terrible just about everywhere, as retaining walls or edgers. What to do? Pile them somewhere until I can decide where they will be least offensive.

I should point out that this house was a foreclosure, and the previous owners put a ton of work into the place in an effort to ‘flip’ the place. The flipping craze went on like a game of musical chairs, until the music stopped and millions were left without a way to pay for the dead real estate they were now stuck with. So everything the previous owners did to the land reeks of desperation. They dropped red mulch everywhere. White pebbles were dumped in front of the house in an effort to create a landscape. Red brick edgers (yes, to hold back the red mulch) were built everywhere, and Arborvitae were planted in front of the windows. Arborvitae! These are for screening yards to block the view, not for covering up houses.

When the wrong ideas strike the mind of a moron, the result is catastrophe. That’s what this place is, a horticultural catastrophe. The place would make Martha Stewart throw her trowel in the air and stomp away.

But not me. I’m a moron too, so despite the futility, I have been digging the place up and trying to make it look at least a little better. It took a year to decide what to do, but I finally have the grand plan. I got rid of the red mulch and brick edgers. I removed as many stones as I could find and piled them in the front yard. I raked all of the white gravel into a pile and removed the front lawn. That’s right, I hand-dug up all the sod in the front yard with a shovel and transferred it to the lower lawn, where it was needed to cover rocks and concrete from an old foundation. The hollow underneath an old greenhouse is now flat, and grapevine has been removed from a tier of daylilies. With the cinder blocks and granite boulders I dug up, I built another retaining wall to hold a garden of annuals and vegetables, and transplanted sedum into the cracks. I planted the front yard with juniper and euonymus, in a bed of kinnickinnick and black mulch.

I am nearly done with the new driveway in front of the house. I decided to take every granite rock I could find and use them for the driveway. Every job has more than one goal: Rocks that don’t belong in the lower yard are moved to the driveway while dirt from the driveway is used to rebuild the lower yard. Mulch that looks terrible in front of the house is used for compost.

The result: The front yard is now worth looking at while the garden tiers are turning into something useful. The top tier is a vegetable garden, the second tier is wildflowers, the third tier is daylilies and sedum, and the lowest tier is sunflowers. And alyssum. The lower lawn will be seeded with grass and clover over buried Dutch Crocuses. The Iris in the back driveway will move to the front yard while the Peonies will move to the wildflower garden. That leaves an overgrown rose garden and a sloping section by the pond. I haven’t decided what to do with these just yet.