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House
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Mark and I closed on our house in June 1998, and are well satisfied with it. It needed no work whatever when we bought it; but that did not prevent us from making a number of structural changes, and of course there’s always work to be done in a garden. The construction that we did, mostly in ’01 and ’02, is exhaustively described in Mark’s Remodeling Page. |
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Mark discusses at length the design and construction of the deck in the back garden, so densely shaded by our magnificent and often overproductive avocado tree. He has not managed to describe in as much detail the charming small fish pool beside the deck. Both deck and pool were designed by our friend Scott Wilson, who worked from basic ideas that Mark offered. |
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But ah! that avocado tree! Because of our foolish reliance on the tender mercies of our regular gardener’s pruner-crew, we have twice, in our nine years’ residence here, had to suffer a year of uncertainty about the tree’s future. The first time they pruned, the result was merely repulsive; but when they did it in Fall of ’06, it was a disaster, because the pruning was followed after a couple of months by several days of hard frost that killed the new growth that was coming in. The tree is now, in Summer of ’07, looking as if it may come through the ordeal, but we’ve decided as a result that if, after several years (many?), the thing needs pruning again, we’ll do as we should have done the very first time: call in a real professional. It’s not looking as peaked now as it did in the early Spring, but in the clumpiness of its foliage, close to the branches everywhere, it does have a poodlish look to it. |