About this time, I was starting to rebel against conforming. I would scour the neighborhood for trash bags of leaves and haul them back to the garden. I dumped about two feet of leaves in all the beds, to the horror of my husband, and said see you later to the garden. I also dumped all the grass clippings from my endless mowing -- Kentucky Blue Grass does not go dormant in the winter. Some of the previously planted flowers’ seeds came up in the spring. They continued to recur, mutating sometimes into unrecognizeable species for years.

The whole neighborhood was planting trees. Their trees were low maintenance, well behaved and decorative. I planted the hill behind the house with citrus trees, thinking of having a vertical orchard. I didn’t think about harvesting anything, figuring that they would just roll down the hill into my kitchen. There are still two of those poor trees left alive, stunted, scrawny, and never having borne a single piece of fruit. I planted the back yard with plums and peaches.

We still get a huge amount of wonderful fruit for two weeks in the spring. Since everyone else in the valley is getting huge amounts of fruit too, it’s either enough plum jam for the next ten years, or the smell of rotting plums for the next month.

The hill behind the house was clay, rocks and seashells. It held the history of when the land had still been part of the ocean. No matter how much organic matter I hauled up to the top and dumped on it, it just washed of blew away. We get amazing Santa Ana winds. When you hear on the phrase “windy below the canyons," that’s us. It could be calm ten miles away in Van Nuys, and we would be having 50 mile an hour winds. The winds would pick up everything, mulch, topsoil, seeds. Santa Ana winds are parching. Those sucked the moisture out of everything and would continue for weeks at a time. Even if I watered twice a day, most of the water either blew away or evaporated. Keeping up the lawn was very frustrating. Flowers like begonias, fuchsias and azaleas just burnt up, turning crisp and brown.