You’ve moved to the Okanagan, and look, your dream home! There’s some gravel and clay to deal with, but don’t you worry about that. If you were here a week ago, you might remember the house with the little gravel steps below its patio.

Well, the pros are at work now! A little backhoe has deposited rocks on top of big sheets of landscape fabric, so nothing grows, because you don’t want anything to grow, that’s the rule, and, there you have it, where just a year ago syilx food plants were growing as they have for 12,000 years, you have a rockslide. That’s right, a house on top of a rockslide. Nice, right? What a beacon!

Fear not. Every stone is hand selected, carried up the slope and fitted into place. This thing is going to stay weed free for five long, lovely years! And then, the ability of rock to capture water, sand and see will make it really pretty.

And as long as no guests step off the patio, and no grand kids do what grand kids do, and no deer do what deer do, and you aren’t tempted to get down there with some herbicide, and start an avalanche, why, the rock ought to stay in place as long as any dry stone wall does anywhere!

A hand-built mountain! Now, how many people can say they have that! But, a warning. This is for the pros. If you can’t support yourself with this kind of gymnastics, stay on the patio. Please. The medical system is currently a little overtaxed. You could snap yourself in two.

But that’s not the most beautiful thing. Here, let me show you that again. Like me, you might have missed it the first time.

See that? Two little landscape plants from a nursery, leaning against a pillar and waiting to become a mountaintop garden in paradise! Oh my, that’s nice. If you want to know what that might look like soon enough, why, heck. Just look at the neighbours’ place.

Beautiful! Why the armaments? Ah. Another neighbour has something to say about that.

And isn’t that the thing. You can try to kill the Earth, but it just won’t have anything to do with it.

Grrrr.