CATEGORY: MRS. ANDERSON
PHOTOS: HOUSE AND YARD

When I met Bob, he was renting the top half of an up/down duplex on S W Condor Avenue in Portland.  Condor Ave. curved up a steep, woodsy ravine between Barbur and Terwilliger Boulevards.  It was near the University of Oregon Medical School and close enough to Bob’s downtown office that he could either walk to work or ride his bicycle.  The Craftsman style duplex, built in 1938, was across the ravine from the street, the only access being by footbridge.  The hillside into which it was wedged was so steep that both stories had their backs into the hill with daylight on the other three sides and with a walk-in basement underneath.

Shortly after we were married, the owners of the house put it on the market for $14,000.  Bob, with my obnoxiously persistent urging, decided to buy it.  Now I had another house to work on!  I was ecstatic!

Because of the steep hillside and lack of auto access, any construction to change the house was impractical.  So I started on the landscaping.   The lot was steep in both directions.  The side hill behind the house was the steepest, but it was also fairy steep from the top of the ravine, up toward Terrwilliger, down to its bottom.

Previous owners had started to fill the ravine with dirt and rocks, which had enabled a house with a front lawn to be built next door to us in the upper part of the ravine.  Continuing onto our property the fill extended to within a few feet of the bridge, where it stopped abruptly, leaving a cliff down to the original depth.  The entire filled area had grown up to blackberry vines, some of which were threatening to grow across the bridge.

Although he slyly pretended to be excessively fond of the berry vines, Bob told me to do anything I wanted with the entire yard.  As always, I first measured everything and did a plan on paper first.  The afore-mentioned house next door was owned by a Japanese couple, Setsu and Hiroshi.  Their house and yard were precise and perfect.  Their front lawn sloped down the ravine and also down toward the street.  I thought it would be wonderful and natural looking if that lawn continued uninterrupted, winding down under our bridge and into the lower ravine, which was forested and completely covered in ivy.  The plan I made was a simple one, carrying out that theme.  It had some retaining walls coming in from the sides so the lawn would descend in undulating curves and enticing little side pockets.

I started by cutting out the berry vines.  Bob made horrible faces, as if I were cutting off his arms and legs.  Some of them (the vines, not his arms and legs) were twelve feet long and two inches at the base.  I cut them in little pieces and burned them.  Then I got a wheelbarrow and shovel and started digging and re-grading.  DIGGING AND REGRADING!  It went on endlessly.  The fill consisted of good top soil along with rocks (both of which I re-used) and enough whisky and wine bottles to build a glass house.

As I started to grade our yard up to meet our neighbor’s, that neighbor, Hiroshi, did something I hadn’t expected; he brought in landscape rock and built a retaining wall straight across the ravine on his property line.  He brought in top soil and built up his lawn, making the retaining wall over two feet higher than the previous grade.  It was like a dam straight across the flow of the lawn I had imagined.  I had to come up with a totally different plan in which the flow of our lawn seemed to be coming from around the two ends of the dam.  As Hiroshi was finishing up his wall, he explained his reasoning to me.  He expressed his fear that his yard would slide down the ravine.  He said, “Eet es pointed down the hill yust like an AYEROW!”  It took weeks to reshape the whole yard once again and build the new retaining walls.  I planted them with aubrietia, candytuft, Basket of Gold, daffodils, tulips and grape hyacinths.

Before this there had been no place to park our cars except on the street.  I drew the plans for a three car garage at right angles to the street on the downhill corner. Fortunately it was on a concave curve so there was room for a driveway coming in from up the hill and even a back-up slot, parallel to the street in which the cars could turn around and not have to back out into traffic.  Then the two of us built the garage.  One of its three bays had been intended for a shop, but after we got the floor up, Bob decided he wanted to use two bays for an art studio for himself and the other for his car.  There was space to park my little Volkswagen on the driveway in front of the studio, so I only gave him a few dirty looks and didn’t complain.

There was a sidewalk along the street in front of Hiroshi’s house but not ours, so I built forms for it to continue down in front of our property too.  I also built forms for our private walkway going straight from the sidewalk across our planned driveway to the bridge.  After the concrete was poured, I filled in the driveway on one side of the walkway and the turning slot on its other side with ten inch lengths of railroad ties dipped in creosote and set in sand with their grain ends up.  It was handsome but proved to be slick when it rained and not lastingly durable.  We later replaced the creosoted blocks with exposed aggregate concrete.

Then, after Hiroshi built his rock retaining wall and also planted a hedge, I built a fence along the sidewalk and around our driveway with a gate opening onto the bridge.  There was a huge native weeping willow down the ravine from the corner of the garage near where our lawn ended, so I planted two new weeping willows at the top of the lawn next to Hiroshi’s wall to disguise its dam-like starkness.  It was a mistake, since they got too big too fast.  But when they were young, these trees, plus the fence, made our whole yard seem like a private, green, shady oasis that , despite the re-design, actually was flowing down the ravine.  I thought that when they got too big, I could keep them pruned like the weeping willows in Japanese gardens.

We had three cats.  They liked to sit on the lawn.  We loved to look down on them from our second story living room window.  Wherever they sat they formed a triangle.  It was totally beautiful.