In mid-June, I lamented on this blog the results of the biennial visit from my gardener/landscaper. He and his crew had once again cut down the jungle that had threatened to engulf my house. They had left my property cleaner, tidier, and less of a neighborhood eyesore. They had also destroyed its character, I feared, that unique character that only my personal touch, or lack of touch, can create.
But I neglected to mention Phase Two of their visit.
The backyard of my neighbor to the south is about four feet higher than my own, separated by a faux stone retaining wall. It's been that way for all the decades that I've owned this property. For years, I hardly gave it a second thought. In fact, the south property was originally the only property not separated from mine by a dense mass of blackberry brambles. A condition afflicting many other lots as well.
But as property values rose, and the neighborhood became increasingly packed with young, well-paid tech workers, and decreasingly with older, shabby-genteel, university-oriented academics, the brambles were rooted out and fences and other barriers were built. But not between me and my southern neighbor.
The property to my south is a rental property, and every year a new crop of young kids -- college, or more frequently just out of college -- takes over. In our fairly sedate neighborhood, they are a noisy exception. And the last group -- who just moved out -- were the most obtrusive. Nice kids, but noisy. And they were the first to use all the possible recreational opportunities of their rented back yard.
As I sat on my back deck, reading Great Literature, the kids to my south were throwing party after party. Our lots are only forty feet in width, so their parties took place virtually under my nose. Or, more precisely, about four feet above my nose.
So I had the gardener plant a hedge. I wanted bamboo, but he assured me it was "too expensive." I then wanted something not dense and opaque -- as is my laurel hedge to my north -- but something that would provide just enough of a screen to keep the Wild Ones next door from staring at me while they played their games, and vice versa.
No problem, he said. And installed a laurel hedge. Oh well.
He installed it just before the temperature was predicted to rise to about 108 degrees (which it, in fact, did). He gave me strict instructions to water it every day. EVERY DAY, he emphasized. He didn't want to come back in two years and find it dead. I appreciated his concern.
And for the first couple of weeks, I watered it EVERY DAY. Then the temperatures dropped to something more Seattle-esque, and I noted that the soil was still quite damp after 24 hours. I now water every other day. The gardener planted fifteen laurel plants, and I water each one for sixty seconds. Yes, I'm methodical, and I keep an eye on my watch.
As you may have gathered from my past confessions, I've have no interest in gardening. I have decent landscaping, but it was all planted before I bought the house in 1987. Perennial flowers that are supposed to last about ten years -- like tulips -- are still flowering every spring. I let my lawn dry up every summer -- as at least half of my neighbors do as well, out of concern for water usage -- and in fact my outdoor water taps are non-functional. I have to run a long hose from my basement laundry tubs to the outdoors.
But -- and here is the point I want to make: Forcing myself to water the hedge on a rigid schedule has given me a a certain interest -- very slight, but significant -- in growing plant life. Like a father who never liked kids until he had his own and began caring for it.
I actually look forward to my every-other-day watering regimen. I even sprinkle some water on other bushes in my back yard, bushes that I've usually allowed to suffer from aggravated thirst every summer. I worry about my 15 laurel bushes. Two or three of them are becoming a lighter shade of green than the others. My god, is this normal? A couple have shed an occasional yellowed leaf. Falling leaves! I worry about them. "Are you feeling ok?" I ask. "Am I giving you enough water? Am I giving you too much water, drowning your young, developing roots? Do you need food -- fertilizer?
All my other shrubs -- 35 years old or more -- have settled down, living boring, conservative life styles. They have proved they are survivors, surviving even my grossly negligent care. But my new hedge plants are so young and sensitive, barely tall enough to peek over the edge of the retaining wall. They are so dependent on me for care, so thirsty (I imagine) not only for water but for affection.
Let's face it. I'm in love.
My entire back yard suddenly seems suffused with a golden aura. I feel a new affection for my rhododendrons, for my blue spruce, for my well established north boundary laurel hedge. Even for my gangling butterfly bush, a plant that always seems on the verge of death, its limbs repeatedly dying and breaking off -- but which still continues to produce beautiful violet flowers year after year.
A final sign of my madness -- I've downloaded the "Picture This" app onto my phone, a handy app that allows me to identify any plant whose photo I snap with the app. My old, pre-hedge self is dismayed. Who cares what plants are called? Who cares about their Latin names?
Madness! What next? Greenhouses in my back yard?
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