A few summers ago we decided that as a family we’d get more use of our backyard if we had a pool. One of our reasons for purchasing the house when we did was its good-sized back yard. Our prior house in San Gabriel has the drive way and garage behind the house (the drive way to the garage went through the back yard) as we had a corner lot so there wasn’t much yard for the kids to play.
After a few years in the house we decided to remodel and add-on. We added a family room, bedroom, bathroom and extended our kitchen. During the remodel we lost some of the yard but it remained good-sized as far as southern California back yards go. As the kids got older and used the yard less, we decided on the pool. During that project we had to remove a fair amount of our landscape including Fig, Pomegranate, Olive, Lemon and several very large palm trees.
The pool project was a pretty dramatic change to our landscape. During the process we had several large Melaleuca trees removed along with many bushes and plants that we’d planted during our remodel to replace lost landscaping. Once the pool was installed, the backyard was pretty much a hardscape which then required a new design.
We decided to leave a small grass area for our dogs and kept the White Birch I had planted a year earlier. Along our back wall we planted two black plum and a Caribbean Copper Tree (later replaced with a Crepe Myrtle). Alone the pool retaining wall we planted White Roses and color and landscape plants including New Zealand Flax, Blue Lobelia and Purple Fountain Glass and then we installed sod around our white birch. The picture above was immediately after the completion of the project so we have considerable growth since this in addition to adding a new 6ft retaining wall at the back of the yard.
During this project, a new sprinkler system and landscape lighting we’re added and finally we needed to install a French drain and dry well to solve a drainage problem we discovered the first few times we used the pool when the kids were splashing around and water from the pool gathered by the BBQ. The French drain extends about 20 feet along the back wall of our property and solved our drainage issues.
3 Years in and the pool gets used a lot…especially by my In laws 🙂
GARDEN BEAUTIFUL 