The space to the right of the front stairs is complicated. If it was just a rectangular patch of ground, I’d have no trouble filling it – a few bushes, ground cover under them, perennials between and in front, maybe some spring-flowering bulbs here and there. But there is the access hatch to the crawlspace under the house, to begin with. We don’t need to get in there often, but we also cannot block it off completely. And there is the water tap, which needs to be even more accessible.

Ideally I’d have have something pretty and green growing in the entire space. But I don’t know of any shade-tolerant ground cover that would stand up to frequent trampling, so for the sake of practicality I’m putting paving stones in the parts where I think we’ll want to walk the most. Wall-to-wall (that is, house wall to retaining wall) in front of the tap, and a shallower bit in front of the hatch, that I’ll hide behind some greenery. To keep the overall impression natural, rather than sleek and paved, I’m leaving gaps here and there between the stones to fill in with ground covering plants.

Laying out irregularly shaped paving stones in an aesthetically pleasing way is hard. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle with no right answer, but plenty of wrong ones, where each piece weighs several kilos. The balance between “pleasantly irregular” and “sloppy” was tricky. It took me three hours of work, and I was knackered by the end of it.