Our friend Andrew gave us a Kalanchoe to kick-off the plant portion of our landscaping project.

So off to Theodore Payne we went for the first part of our plant buying spree. Since it’s the summer, the selection is pretty limited, but we picked up some Marrow, Yarrow, Lupine, Sage, Buckwheat, Penny Royale, Fuchsia, Milkweed, Manzanita and a Catalina Cherry.

Next we scored free tickets to the Huntington Gardens and attended the Los Angeles Cactus and Succulent Society sale, filled with crazy plants and even crazier people.

That thing on the right with flowers that look like string beans is a Tylecodon Wallichi from South Africa. I went up to the guy who was selling it, and said “Can I ask you a question about this thing?” and he said “Why, look at your freckles!”

Other than that Wallichi, we stayed away from the exotics, especially the ones that were super expensive and looked like we could kill it in one stroke.

Plant buying is a little stressful (way more so than rock shopping), so we shugged off some extra weight and went on vacation for a week.

Which prepared us to move our bricks yet again from the backyard into the front so the landscape guy could use them. These bricks are from our old deck and we’ve hung on to them because they’re odd-shaped and handmade and we seem to enjoy moving bricks around. This is probably the fourth time we’ve moved them, roughly 400 of the buggers.

We chalked out the path for the bricks, dropped in the rest of the rocks, and set the plants in place. GULP.

A moment of WTF is that?

And here’s our completed project! Now we get to submit our photos to DWP and wait for the rebate to come. Notice the stack of bricks is gone. We used about half of them and had to move them into the backyard. Lucky for us our landscape guy and his two sons are so cool they helped us move them (and strong – they carried 9 or 10 bricks at a time). Maybe we’ll build a fire pit? BBQ?