A city garden makeover. A joy garden! The project needed to sing with the client’s playful creativity, quirky sense of humor, and her eclectic collection of objects. And we made it rhyme with the architecture of the curvy deck. In the temperate, marine-influenced climate of San Francisco, we built a tropical shade garden using recycled cobblestones to build the curvature of the walls. Some of my favorite materials to work with, the cobbles are a re-used resource. First they were cut to be laid in the streets of the city by Italian immigrants who brought stonemason skills from the old country. Later they were buried under asphalt and now they are routinely dug up during road construction. The original stones were ground into soft curves by the passage of horses’ hooves and wagon wheels. You can touch them and feel the wear of history. They lend themselves well to curved wall work.