When I first bought my magical medieval quarter abode, there was a pile of rubble and some ugly pots in the street in front... Slowly-slowly, I constructed an improvised raised bed, and got some herbs and flowers growing under the established lemon tree.
It's a particular micro-climate, with intense full-sun for most of the middle of the day, but also lots of wind in the cold weather, where it whips around the corner up the steps... So finding the right plants was hard.
Over the years, as a direct result of my own hard work inviting enthusiastic foreigners to the town, the municipality have reamde the streets... After an initial worry that they'd rip out my garden (they did, but we saved it all in pots in my stable, first), I persuaded them that my holding the Keys To The City permitted me to claim a street garden, and that they'd have to remake it if they took it apart :-D
Now it has a beautiful stone wall, and is currently thriving with giant poppies, tons of herbs, and enthusiastic 'pianti grassi' (succulents) which explode with colour every time the sun gets on them. This is a photo from last evening, so is fairly somber in colour...
It was a lot of hard work getting an abandoned house (and town!) like this in shape, and the garden was a good example: tons of earth carried up hundreds of steep steps from the gardens below, and along the street, in the baking sunshine... Struggling to get plants to grow in the not-so-good soil... Having it dismantled and remaking it from scratch... Having various locals steal plants and poppy heads (!) - my precious, hard-earned foods and pleasures... Waiting 8 years for a crop of lemons, after finally realising that if I don't cover it with a blanket in the winter, it gets too weakened to make fruit...
To now, sitting of an evening in the beautiful, smart, clean street, with the intoxicating scent of tons of lemon flowers and roses wafting by (instead of the former animal smells!)... It's a glorious thing to enjoy how a place has been improved, and to sit back and appreciate one's own part in it :-)
