1992: The Avenue
The Avenue is part of a larger initiative to build enough paths to suggest, guide and facilitate walking through the yard in a structured way. From the start, I pictured a network of paths encircling the yard and leading me from one focal point to another.
One approach to path-planning that I consider credible is the one where you let your dogs out and wait for the paths to appear. Then you add your surfaces and transitions on the basis of the plan they have laid out for you.
Pirate instinctively fell in with my idea of a long path around the edge of the yard, with a stop by the pond, plus one bee-line from the back door to the patio where we sometimes dine outside.
Today, I think we might have 500 feet or more of paths of various styles and surfaces, including crushed granite, brick, limestone, and grass. The Avenue was one of the first. It crosses the back of the yard behind the pond.
The southeast corner of the yard was the first to receive a serious tall wood fence, when a developer built a house on what we had all been assured would remain the head of a greenbelt behind that corner of the yard. Grrr.
So we fenced the house out of sight and mind, and planted black bamboo. Norma already had golden bamboo (a seriously tougher customer than the tall but unaggressive black bamboo) along her south fenceline. Between them, the two bamboos have shut out the offending settlement to the southeast.
This left the south fenceline as a shady passageway between the southeast corner, which is the patio and the bamboo, and the southwest corner, which is a little brick landing with a stone bench for sitting in the sun on warm winter days.
In this stretch of natural pathway, energetically traversed by Pirate, and more recently by Wily, at all hours, Craig built the Avenue. He leveled it to a generous width of eight feet, laid roadbase, and then topped it with crushed granite.
There is a natural gully between the southwest corner and the start of the Avenue. I made a bridge out of timbers and salvaged an old stone gate post from the vacant lot behind us.
The concept of the Avenue is derived from (don't laugh) the Hound of the Baskervilles. I'll have to refresh my memory, but I believe that it is when walking out on a path called the Avenue that the hound's first victim meets his fate.
The Avenue is in fact an exciting place. The Resident lives on one end, and the other end was the scene of the unpleasantness about the young possum just this last winter. Many a night we've sat up in the patio after a long dinner while the darkness deepens.
You can hear bits of sound from across the ravine, an occasional car in the distance, maybe the bark of a dog. Wily's radar-ears turn this way and that. But the Avenue waits in perfect silence until we blow out the candles, stack our dishes on a tray, and pick our way back to the house with its lighted windows.
Related: Murder in the Bamboo Forest
