From gravel pit to rock garden

Our house has a courtyard near the entrance. Well, I say courtyard. It’s more of an open space between three-and-a-half walls near, not at, the entrance. (As the realtors might say, it’s “entryway adjacent.”)

This space has always been a bit of a utilitarian mess. The only usable hose bib in the front is located here, and there are the remnants of some mechanical hookups from ages gone by: the fan for the a/c used to be on this side of the house, and when we moved it to the other side, the contractor didn’t want to mess with the electrical, so there’s a fusebox visible even though nothing’s hooked up to it anymore. There’s also an antique phone service box left over from when BellSouth piped in the comms. You can see various capped pipes from the sprinkler system and the drainline from the a/c, and there’s even a crawlspace access hidden behind the trunk of the palm in the picture:

Speaking of that trunk, it belongs to a Christmas palm (Adonidia merrillii), native to the Philippines, and named for the bright red fruits it bears:

A nice tree. Not really the one I, as a native plant gardener, would have chosen to center my courtyard around, but I don’t feel like using my time machine to head back the 25 years or so it’s been in place to try to rectify that mistake. This exotic palm, along with the mechanical ghosts on the walls and in the ground, are what we have to work with in this courtyard space.

For years I’ve tried various strategies to improve this space, mostly with mulch and native plants, hoping to find something that could stand up to the very strong afternoon sun and heat reflecting off the driveway to the west and the walls all around. The hardiest plant turned out to be bloodberry, a plant that is very attractive to pollinators but rather less to humans. Cordia globosa is the botanical name:

As you can see, though, the resulting look is pretty shabby for the entryway to a tidy home. Over time, the various plantings and layers of mulch simply gave rise to weeds and dirt. And with the huge palm taking up so much of the central area, I was never really able to use plants to provide a good focus for the space. And that was the story of the first decade or so of our use of the courtyard: unfocused and not very presentable. You can see it looking about as good as it ever got in this shot from New Year’s Eve 2018:

In early October of this year, though, my brother Randy came to town for a brief visit. We took him to the nearby Morikami Gardens, a Japanese cultural center and garden in Delray Beach. It had been quite a while since I had been there, and I’d forgotten how much I enjoy the Zen gardens there. One of them, the Late Rock Garden, got me to thinking about the gravel bed I had in my courtyard:

Here is Heather Gryzbek, the garden curator at Morikami giving a demonstration of the raking technique used in these Karesansui (dry rock gardens) spaces:

The interplay of boulders and gravel and courtyard walls, and even of the large ficus “mountains” behind the courtyard there at the Morikami were inspirational, although I had to let the ideas percolate around in my head for a few weeks before they would amount to anything. Here’s a really nice shot of it from 2017, before the ficus was damaged by the whitefly infestation that’s been plaguing Palm Beach County for the past several years:

A few weeks after my brother’s visit, the weather, as it will here in November in South Florida, turned nice for a week or so. And, as they will here in November in South Florida, more visitors began to arrive. This year, my dad and stepmom were here for Thanksgiving week. So I gave the courtyard a much-needed weeding, and I found that I definitely preferred the resultant sparseness to the previous plants/dirt/weeds. But the bare gravel (several different types, from a nice local limestone pea rock to large white marble chips from the local home center) and large pavers left over from previous landscaping left it looking a bit of a hodge-podge:

Pop was going to be here for several days, and I decided we needed to have a project for us to focus around. The barren courtyard just seemed like a natural fit: not too labor- or cost-intensive and easily doable in the short timeframe of their visit. I went through a few drafts of ideas for how to adapt a zen garden like the ones at Morikami to our site, and eventually came up with what seemed like a workable plan, involving a border, a water feature, and a retaining wall.

So I drafted Pop into helping cart a few dozen bags of Mexican Beach pebbles from the home center, along with some edging materials for borders and any fanciful designs we might be inspired to create. We added a bunch more limestone pea rock in the field, and we came up with a “water feature” (a “river” to symbolically guide the water that comes down the drainspout), and voila:

The well/retaining wall in the background turned out to be a lot more effort than we’d anticipated. Thankfully, my Pops was up to the task. He rented us a brick saw from the nearby rental center and chopped the pressed sandstone bricks to fit, so we could stack them up in the sort of elliptical shape the odd geometry of the crawlspace digout required. (I wish I’d taken photos during that process, but our hands were dirty, and the water was flying!)

The courtyard looks so much more presentable now, I honestly can barely remember how shabby it used to look. Here it is a couple of weeks after the initial work, now all lit up for the holidays:

We even made our own “zen gravel” rake from an old pushbroom and a 1 x 6 I had lying around:

So far, only the cats seem to have adopted a truly zen attitude in contemplation of the the space, but I am loving how this project turned out.

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