Some pictures from cleaning up the lower garden. This is our front yard on the other side of the driveway. The pictures are from a week ago.

When we bought the house we didn’t actually know we had this lovely area. It wasn’t until we were enjoying our yard one of the first nights we moved in and wandering around that we noticed the steps and went down. There were vines strangling almost everything. When I trimmed down a nandina and pulled all the vines out of it I noticed there’s a lovely live oak on my neighbors property shading the area. I put the decomposed granite down there when we did the rest of the front yard, and it’s actually killed most of the vines since their root system was under the grassy patch in the middle and the visible parts coming up in the flower bed.
My work at making sure there’s not too much leafy buildup has really led to a increase in blooming irisis this year. But there used to be a ton of mondo grass that I let die in last years drought. I couldn’t justify using the water to keep it alive. Not sure what I’ll replace it with yet.