A Bit of Green

When we first agreed to move back to Hawaii to watch over my mother, we weren't thrilled with the house she lived in.  There's no privacy in the way the rooms were modified by the previous owners.  We wanted to buy another house and have her move in with us.  However, mom did not want to leave her neighbors.  She said that through all the moves she's made in life, she's learned that if you have good neighbors, you have to treasure and keep them.

Art sighed and said, "If the mountain won't come to Mohammed..."

So we bought her house and renovated.  And since it's too expensive to build in Hawaii, we had the contractor do just the outside of the house and the inside is Art's "Retirement Project."

One of the things we really didn't like about this house was the lack of yard space.  It seemed concrete covered everything.  The nice thing is you don't have to mow the lawn.  The bad thing is it looks ugly as far as I'm concerned.

The concrete also prevented rain water from draining properly and during our visit back to Hawaii could see the water cascading down into the neighbor's property on the right.

During one rainfall, they said it was a continuing problem but they realized nothing could be done.

We thought about it and asked our contractor to cut a strip of concrete off and put in a drainage pipe so water from the back could drain into storm sewers instead of the neighbor's property below.

This is the drainage pipe.  The job was bigger than we first envisioned.

Dirt was then put back into the trench and it felt like we had a blank slate to work on.


I loved the thought that we could finally have some greenery.

While we were back in Illinois my brother, Dennis took on the arduous task of landscaping the new "Herb garden".

We were thrilled with all his hard work. He knew that his mother would love the Japanese garden effect.

His basil plant grew tall and luxurious which he loved because he makes pesto whenever he can.

The lemon grass (which we've removed) and rosemary also grew to monstrous sizes and kept threatening to overrun everything.

It was driving mom a little crazy, so Art and I dug up the rosemary this week which took up our entire garden recycle bin and planted a couple of basil plants.

We're keeping our fingers crossed that the basils will do well. 

Mom is happy because she loves the idea that her favorite son will (hopefully) have basil leaves to harvest again someday.

And now, Art and I will step back a little because gardening what little we have is Mom's domain and she must be getting a little nervous with us puttering in her area.

One of the loveliest memories I have of the renovation is our neighbor visiting with a box of mangoes after the herb garden was done and letting us know how much they had appreciated our efforts.  It's nice to be as good a neighbor as you can be.