Don’t get me wrong. I love lawns. They’re swell for lounging and strolling barefoot. But — and this is the literal straw that broke my back, as it were — they have to be mown.

My house, in north Portland, used to have a lawn out front. It was lush and swooping (it curved down four feet to the sidewalk) and covered nearly 3,000 square feet. That, alas, is a lot of lawn. So my husband and I decided that it had to go. The replacement? A stone wall.

But not just any wall. This wall was going to have built-in beds for shrubs and flowers, so it would look green as well as colorful and soft as well as hard. And this wall was not really going to be a wall at all; with a second staircase added on, this wall would make our home easier to visit, not tougher.

We hired a friend, a professional landscape designer and contractor. He drew pretty pictures and we oohed and aahed and then, one day in February, an enormous pile of rocks appeared in front of our house. Good lord, we have ordered a quarry.

No, no, our friend assured us. It’s a pile of rocks now, but it will soon be a wall. And he began to build.

His method was both the simplest and the trickiest: He looked at the rocks and selected one, then picked it up or maneuvered it into the place he wanted it to go. And then he did this again. And again. For six weeks.

Our street is busy with traffic and pedestrians, so the repetition of his work was mirrored in the daily comments he received:

“Wow, that looks like a lot of work.”
“Are you doing that all by yourself?”
“Where’d you get those rocks, anyway?”

He is a patient man, and he’s used to his job. When he finished, however, and we began filling in the wall with plants, we were startled by the commentary that came our way:

“Hey, nice job!”
“Your wall looks great!”
“I can’t believe how beautiful it is!”

Our friend had done all the work, and we were receiving all the credit.

While the wall was under construction, we had seen passers-by stopping to stare at it. We couldn’t decide what they thought of it; they didn’t smile, they simply stared. But as the wall grew, and reached hand height, we’d catch the neighbors reaching out to pat it, or pointing at patterns in the rocks.

And now they were grinning at us, calling out encouragement as they drove by, even pulling over and getting out and walking over to commend us. One woman picked up a piece of litter and gave it to us, saying, “Everything looks so lovely, I didn’t want this to mess it up.”

In a year or so, if we water well, the plants will have filled in the wall, and maybe then the wall won’t be so noticeable. But I kind of like it the way it is now.