As glorious as these stepped gardens are, the emotionally upsetting part is wondering, 'What happens to my life's work once I'm not there to do it?' One can only hope there is a Sancho Panza in the wings to give worth to our endeavours.

My mother used to hate Oxalis because when the leaves/stems were tugged from the soil, invariably the bulk of the little bulbs were left behind to sprout again. Poor Mum would get very frustrated if we kids tried to help by pulling out the plants!

bhk: My father used to cultivate the slopes of the orchard area by turning over the soil - by hand, with a shovel - each spring in order to control the weeds. A lot of work, especially as one's age advanced. Hell, I griped plenty as a teen when he talked me into helping out. So planting oxalis, and in another area dichondra, accomplished the same thing but without the back-breaking labor. And it looked pretty. Al-Thib: I appointed myself City Manager and Fire Chief, but Mayor and Police Chief were elective offices; Father usually Mayor and Mother Police Chief. There; that ought to reveal something about our family. We also voted in weekly taxes for a while, 10 cents/head, which we later applied to the purchase of a barbecue - er, grill - as seen in an earlier submission of mine.

What was the reason behind the cultivation of oxalis?
(We classify that as a weed Down Under.)
Was it just that your dad hadn't cleared those garden beds for crops?

tterrace, my only childhood regret is not having a kid like you with such an active imagination living next door. Or down the road, in my case [I grew up in the country with the nearest neighbor about 1/4 mile away].

I like the idea of making the backyard an incorporated city, and naming the "streets". Were you the mayor of Penton, or was that your dad's job?

Anyway, keep those hits coming. Always a treat waiting to see what you'll come up with next.

Tterrace, I love your photos! This reminds me of my dad, who was 74 in 1979. He and my mom both grew up on Norway's Atlantic coast, and my dad was always torn between being a fisherman and being a gardener. So he did both. Our garden was just a little garden behind a little house in a little town in Montana, but I remember sitting out there on summer evenings eating baby carrots, pulled from the ground and washed off under the hose; the Norwegian gooseberries when they were ripe; the beets and turnips and rutabagas and parsnips and all of those things nobody eats anymore. And right next to the garden was his smoker for trout and perch and salmon. Wow. I didn't realize how much I missed it all.

The area with the church is down the hill beyond the left edge of the picture. It'd be obscured by trees and bushes and probably be too small to make out anyway, being only 18 inches tall at most. Oh, and in my recital of vegetables in the garden, I forgot asparagus. Yuck.

I looked for it but didn't see it in this picture. Was it in another part of the yard, or am I not looking in the right spot? What nice place to grow up.

Your father was gifted as a born landscape architect, although I'm pretty sure he didn't consider himself as such. There is so much to see here, so many facets of gardening are represented and so much hard work that must have taken many years to develop, not to mention the physical effort and time he put in to beautify and create this bountiful backyard. My parents and grandparents did similar cultivation of the earth's rewards, nothing as elaborate as yours, but I did not inherit their penchant for growing things. I wonder if youngsters today even realize that most of their food comes from seeds that require loving care, rain and sunshine to grow into delicious nourishment and/or beautiful flowers (food for the soul). Your father had to be extremely proud of his creation, it is quite magnificent.

Your dad was very traditional: you have land, you till it and raise food on it. No square meter was wasted. Classic. It's a great insight into your father and what life must have been like growing up. You were very lucky, Sir.

This would have been an awesome playground for an imaginative kid.

When I was a kid in the '60s we had a playhouse in our back yard and we made little trails to ride our bikes to and from the "house." It was nowhere near as big as this, though. It was also pretty much barren since we lived in the Mojave Desert.