Or The Neighborhood Association. Having to live with other people is never a good thing-having to follow their rules is worse. Few things are more annoying than being a plant lover in a community of plant haters. The only thing worse is living with people stuck in the 1950s who still think a Lawn and a perfectly trimmed hedge is the height of agricultural good taste.
I have never been a big fan of the whole manicured lawn thing-which tends to bring up images of Edward Scissorhands and The Stepford Wives. There is something completely sterile and unnatural about having that smooth green billiard table in front of a house. Add to that the fact that I am pretty lazy and you find that there is a patch of mostly grass growing in front of my home, but it could not really be called a lawn.
The Wife is even more esthetically challenged than I am. She has a strong dose of the White Trash gene and is one of those people that thinks an inside out tire makes a nice planter. We don’t have any inside out tires, but we do have a lot of plants of one sort or another-and anything that is not a flat green sea of tranquility is not something Other People want to see. So we get the occasional note from the Office to clear the vine off the fence, cut the grass, trim the limbs, and so on and so forth.
The idea is that no one wants to live next door to the Granny as she whips up a fresh batch of The Recipe in one corner of the yard and she fries up an opossum in the other. That whole Redneck thing about cutting the grass and finding a car also comes to mind. My yard is not going to find it’s way into Better Homes and Gardens, but I don’t think it’s all that bad either. But then, that’s the problem, it doesn’t really matter what I think, it’s what the Office thinks.
I am not as active in the whole gardening arena as I once was-but The Wife has taken up the banner and subdivided the yard into man raised beds and gravel paths. In the fullness of time, she plans on having the whole yard turned into either beds or pathways-not unlike one of the gardening shows. There are a few other people in our little community who have large gardens, but they often look a little more Martha Stewart than our garden looks. Ours still needs a bit of work-but then, a garden always needs a bit of work-that’s kind of the point.
My own small contributions is to do a bit of the grunt work now and then and to suggest a few chili peppers and the occasional fig tree and wormwood plant. I had a ginkgo tree once, but we don’t have much room for such things at the moment. The Wife does most of the work and picks most of the plants. Gardening is a good thing-when we’re not being yelled out to clean it up a bit.
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