Wanted to post this little before and after of our house from exactly 5 years apart. We live just a few steps away from the shop and despite it being one of the hottest neighborhoods on the continent it really is possible to work with the environment to make habitat in any bit of space. In 2017 our yard was just bare rock and a large, useless Bermuda lawn. After years of (backbreaking) labor + tons of experimenting we’ve got an incredible ecosystem with massive amounts more biodiversity than most yard around us; toads and leopard frogs, hundreds of lizards, dozens of bird species, dozens of bee and wasp species and even dragonflies visit our yard to eat, drink, relax and lay eggs. Having grown up here I’m used to pools being the norm. As much as I want to say they’re sterile and bad, I also love going to a friends house to swim. We took another approach by adding this living pool/swim-pond. It requires very little maintenance. No chlorine necessary. It provides valuable and extremely rare riparian habitat to an area that once was in the historic flood zone. It’s still a questionable use of water, but I won’t defend it much here. Stay tuned this season as we expand into our shop garden. We’ll be curating rare, native and unusual landscape plants that aren’t easy to find and certainly harder to find being sold so close to downtown. We’re open all weekend at the shop, daily 9-7. We’ve got an incredible selection of indoor plants, pottery AND have added quite a cool selection of palms, cycads, cacti and succulents over the past few weeks. Feel free to ask any of us about them. Or to inquire about landscape design from Coby. His degree and field was Landscape Architecture before he joined our team in 2018 after working for two renowned firms in both Arcadia and Chicago.