return and redo several areas in the garden. We purchased and retrofitted a lovely Indonesian Tea House Pavilion to cover the pile of chips that was the stump of the pine tree. I built a Moroccan styled gas fire pit, and removed areas of sad lawn, replacing them with gravel, mosaic stepping stones, and lots of matching brown glazed Vietnamese and Thai ceramic pots filled with succulents and bromeliads.

Tea House and Brugmansia in bloom

Trampoline and lawn

I have been making trips down to L.A. in the Spring and Fall ever since to add to the garden. Two years ago we removed a sunken trampoline that was built in to a lawn area in a secluded side garden. An expensive round retaining wall of concrete block had been built aboutnoisy mowing and blowing and endless watering to keep it alive. We gave the trampoline away to a happy family. The heavy soils were amended with lots of compost and manure, and I set to work capping the round wall with a ring of striped pebble mosaic. I envisioned the space as a Moroccan keyhole door set in the ground, a kind of magical kiva like space entered by a path of large mosaic stepping stones.

The largest part of the project was building a set of pebble mosaic steps down in to the sunken garden. It was like making a tiered cake, vertically stacking the pebbles in rows, letting them set up overnight, and adding another layer. While I was working on this project a writer from the