Brick Project Update

A white house surrounded by brick-lined garden beds

For the past year I’ve been working on outlining all my garden beds with bricks. I dig a trench around each bed, sink the bricks about halfway into the soil, and arrange them in a sawtooth pattern. The bricks add a nice, tidy edge to my rather wild beds, which are filled with huge needle palms and wildflowers that seed themselves wherever they feel like it.

I usually work on my brick project from four, when my office job ends (I’m still working from home), till about six-thirty or seven on weekdays, though of course I’m not really working solidly that whole time. I always do a lot of lollygagging when I’m outside. I love meeting box turtles in the yard and looking up at the sky and smelling the big lemony Ashe magnolia flowers that are blooming now in April. There are still plenty of kumquats and orangequats on our trees, and I frequently stop for snacks.

Sometimes June, our smart little tuxedo cat, will come out and supervise my work. She’ll take dust baths and squawk at me. She’s so bossy and busy that Rob and I like to play that she’s a local Quincy business tycoon. She owns all the crappy businesses in town (we pretend), loves to cut corners in terms of quality and service, and is a billionaire.

Anyway, here are a few pictures of my brick-edged beds. I’m still not done with this enormous project, but I’m getting there!


I never have the right pictures. Of course I’ve run out of relevant shots of the bricks, so here’s an irrelevant one of a Christine Sibley sculpture surrounded by Safrano roses.



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