In the 1980s, people all over the country stopped eating eggs and beef because of the cholesterol scare, and the feed mill shut down. The mysterious tapping sounds they had been attributing to ghosts in the attic turned out to be drops of rainwater leaking through the roof and hitting the ceiling, and the plumbing backed up because the roots of the eucalyptus tree had clogged up the antique red-clay pipes that formed the septic-tank drainfield. The roofer came down out of the attic shaking his head, and the plumber came up from behind the garden saying, “Uh, uh, uh.”

In 1987, Eva sold the house to a hotel-and-restaurant corporation. Within three months it was replumbed, rewired, reroofed, and repainted. A bulldozer leveled the grot and filled in the rice bog. In one day a team of professional gardeners hacked through the tangle of roses and ferns with Weed Eaters and chain saws until they came down to the old winding paths, the sundial, and the poem on its marble slab. They trimmed the opening under the tea-olive trees into a neat arch, they replaced the rampant Lady Banksia and Seven Sisters with modern, controllable roses, they patched the pool and installed a recirculating filter pump with a spray fountain and a bronze nymph, and they edged the Ophiopogon borders. In the ferns, where the grot had been, they put a teak Chinese Chippendale-style bench with a potted topiary-tree rosemary at each end.

In 1990, to commemorate its opening as a country inn, the house and its garden were featured on the cover of Leisure South magazine. In April, when the roses came into bloom, the magazine editor and a photographer came down from Atlanta. The editor was feeling weary of her job—the endless articles she would write in the magazine’s relentlessly jaunty style about redecorating family rooms and putting up redwood fences. The photographer was feeling bitter. On the long drive from the airport he showed her a photograph he had taken at a New Year’s celebration in Chinle, Arizona—an old man and an old woman dancing, their eyes closed, both his big, lumpy hands clasped behind her fat, bulging back. In the background glittery things shimmered out of the blackness.

“This is my Moonrise over Hernandez,” he said.

They stood for a minute in the shade of the two tea-olive trees and looked into the sunny garden.

“And here I am at another goddamned garden, another goddamned dewdrop on another goddamned rose, more of that goddamned green murk in the background.” He stepped out into the sunlight and went to work, not quite focusing on a full-blown Tropicana rose, catching a rainbow in the spray behind the nymph, zooming in on a tiger swallowtail on a potted red geranium.