I’m attempting to be more organized in my declining years. At this stage in my life, every day is a blessing. My health is good and there is no reason to think it won’t continue that way but at some point time runs out. Do I have 10 years? 20 years? More? How much resolve and focus do I retain? How much strength and stamina.?
What I can say is that my physical abilities are diminished. I’m not a young buck any more and any projects I undertake must accept the reality of aging and marshal my resources efficiently.
Then too, I have never mustered the discipline to actually plan my garden projects. This may be a mental flaw or a defensive excuse for when my projects don’t work out as I hoped.
I originally believed that selling a house in California would provide buckets of cash to do whatever we want in Texas. This is not happening. We will have enough but only if we hold to a budget. It seems as we proceed that Texas is catching up to California cost wise. So as I think about landscaping our 8 acre Texas estate, I’m back to DIY. But maybe this time I can be smarter.
As I shopped for our estate, I realized that I wanted more than a large lot. It wasn’t just the land. I wanted seclusion. I also wanted the ‘Hill Country view’ which, to me meant not seeing the neighbors. Initially the developments I looked at were just like our house in California with lots sized four times bigger. I remember back in California, I had been interested in a development with 5 acre lots on the flats south of Sacramento. But I couldn’t get interested in flat land with no views and visible neighbors. I didn’t want just space. I wanted privacy and seclusion.
The first development I looked at had 1 to 2 acre lots in hilly country. They looked good now with very few houses but the older parts just looked like my old California neighborhood spread out. Plus they had community centers and a huge mailbox complex miles from the houses. I didn’t want to pay for facilities I would never use and I didn’t want picking up the mail to be an adventure. I’d been annoyed at my old house because I had to walk one block to the mailbox (no home delivery). I didn’t look forward to driving miles each day to pick up the mail.
I also started thinking about landscaping. Many of the lots with houses were scalped of the native grasses and given lawns and other conventional landscaping around their houses. I wanted to keep the native plantings because I liked the look and didn’t want the maintenance of an introduced lawn. What I did like was underground utilities and city water. Was there there a development with basic amenities and low overhead?
There was. I found a hilltop lot of eight acres with underground utilities and no community overhead. It even had mail delivery. It was half the cost of the 1 acre lots I had considered. I snapped it up.
It took about a year and a half to relocate to a nearby rental and nearly one more year to reach agreement on a house for the site. Now, as we wait to start construction, my thoughts turn to landscaping the property. I don’t want to change the nature of the land. I want to enhance it and use plantings to fit the house into nature. But first I have to learn more about native plants and what the weather really is like here.
