The Hanging Gardens of Cloud Temple
Our Home in Cypress Park provided the grounds for our first Otherworld Garden; a retreat for friends and family with an abundance of pollinator friendly flowers, citrus, vegetables, and herbs. This continues to be our ever-changing experimental garden, our food forest, and our faerie portal.
Before
This low resolution image from Zillow is the best representation of what the yard looked like when we moved in. The citrus trees were healthy, but besides a hammock and a foundation from an old hot tub that had been removed: not much going on. We knew we wanted to grow food and hide the fences that made us feel... fenced in, but while Marissa nerded out reading The New Sunset Western Garden for the fourth time and Zander built his photo studio over the hot tub foundation, we began letting the land speak to our imaginations.
After
Some plants flourished, others did not. We learned so much! And we made a deal: if Zander built it, Marissa would plant it. With a partnership that would eventually grow into Otherworld, they soon had a passionfruit vine that grew 25 feet a year to hide the fences, bundles of white sage drying on the roof, fresh heirloom tomatoes from Fig Earth Supply's Tomato Mania, and enough oranges to give dozens to friends and family.
Although Zander built his studio at the top, the terracing and hardscaping proved too much and too risky for one person. Hiring hardscape contractors to implement our design, we not only created permanent terraces and a trex deck for the studio, but prevented erosion that saved the blood orange tree and helped mitigate a complicated hillside drip irrigation.
