Garden

I live in the neighborhood of Rockridge in Oakland, right off College Avenue near the Berkeley border. Apparently this area is known for its "cute bungalows and abundant gardens (click on title link)." What's funny here is that I live in what I believe is a bungalow house, and we have what some might call a garden in our front yard. It certainly contains lots of flowers at the moment (and weeds). Every day I come home and something in our yard changes, but not because anyone in our house has done anything to it. Actually, it's usually the work of our next door neighbor and her son. "I love the sunshine," our next door neighbor told me very early one morning when I came outside to walk my dog and found her pulling weeds and other plants out of our yard. She is 85 if she isn't 100, but with energy and wide smiles to burn. She always says that the owner of our house (I'm renting an attic room) gave her permission to work in our yard any time she wants. She is nobody you can argue with, so I just said that's great and went about my business. Then today I came home from some chores and found her son clipping away at the tall plants along the edge of our yard with a pair of hedge clippers. I asked him if somebody had paid him to work on our yard and he said, again, that the owner of the house had given him permission long ago to cut things in our yard any time he likes.

Maybe I'm not explaining this situation very well. Most people on our street have nicely manicured little front yards with lots of pretty plants and a clear sense of landscaping and design. When I first moved into this house a little over six months ago, the front yard was two patches of dirt on either side of the sidewalk. They had just chopped down a pine tree in the front yard. My roommate Al had invited a friend of his, a woman whom he refers to as "the scientist" because she works at UC-Berkeley in one of the science departments, to come over and help out our yard. She planted some type of native grass seed and in a short time tiny green buds appeared in the soil, and it seemed like we were going to have a nice little grass lawn. But somewhere along the line our "grass" turned into this wild jungle of many different plants including some with thick, hearty stems and the ability to grow like wildfire (as the saying goes). Anyway, now to look at it we have an impressive "garden" overflowing out over the sidewalk on all sides and meanwhile cats, birds, mice, insects--you name it--are finding little homes down under the brush, and neighbors seem to all notice it as they walk by, for better or worse.

I keep telling Al that we need to ask the owner to do something about the yard. We have been told that the owner's daughter will be working on it "when the rain stops" but that's all we know. Al tells me it is beautiful just the way it is anyhow, and he tries to make me agree every time I bring the subject up. "For somebody who calls himself an artist (well, a photographer anyway)," he said to me not long ago, "You sure don't appreciate beauty." I'm not saying that I don't like the beautiful bougainvillea blooming bright magenta over to the side of the house, although it too is rather unwieldly-looking, or many of the other flowers currently blooming there in our front yard. It's just that anyone in their right mind can tell that none of this was planned (except of course the bougainvillea). It is growing wild in a way that you would normally only expect to find in a vacant lot somewhere or outside an abandonded house near Watsonville, say, or somewhere similarly rural. Don't get me wrong either--I like interesting gardens. Robert Irwin's garden design at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles is one of my favorite of its kind in the world. It's just that our yard makes it look like nobody lives in the house, or that anybody who does live in the house is probably a penniless invalid.

"Why don't you do something about it yourself," Al tells me, and we've been through this before. I realize he makes a good argument there.

"I don't have any garden tools," I tell him. "And," I go on, "It seems like I shouldn't have to invest in them for somebody else's yard, even if I do live here." But he's right, I guess I should go next door and borrow those hedge clippers that the neighbor's son was using earlier today. After all, I love the sunshine, too.

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