Projects · The grounds · 2023–2024
The middle yard, the cedar tub, and a great many plants
The stretch between the patio and the pool used to be the part of the yard you walked through to get somewhere else. Then came a cedar hot tub on a gravel pad, a very long plant list, and a 2024 that changed the whole back of the property.
Every old property has a middle distance — the stretch that isn’t the house and isn’t the destination, the part you walk through on the way to somewhere else. Ours was the run between the back patio and the pool, and for our first stretch here it was mostly lawn, mostly fine, mostly ignored.
First, the tub
The hot tub arrived before the yard deserved it. A six-person cedar tub, set on a gravel pad while everything around it was still a work in progress — for a while it sat there like furniture delivered to a room that hadn’t been built yet.
We kept it at 101°F anyway, and it turned out that a hot tub doesn’t wait for landscaping. Some of the best soaks of that first winter happened in what was, honestly, a construction site.
Then, the yard
In 2024 the whole middle yard got its turn: a new lawn, a stepping-stone path running down toward the pool, and serious planting — rhododendrons, hydrangeas, and a long list of natives filling in the beds between the patio, the driveway, and the pool fence. The idea was simple: make the walk to the pool feel like part of the property instead of a shortcut across it.
Where it landed
The tub got its finished home on the stone patio, with the gardens grown in around it — and the walk from the back door to the pool now passes rhododendron blooms in June, hydrangeas most of the summer, and a lawn that finally earns its acreage.
The tub holds 101°F all year. Winter, with snow on the cedars and steam off the water, is — in our opinion — its finest season.
Where: The 1844 House