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TALL FENCES…MAKE GOOD NEIGHBORS
Whether you have a zero-lot-line or 500 acres, every gardener has neighbors, inspiring a 'story to tell'. Whether they be
sad or glad or both, they are always amazing. Here are some I have heard, and we invite you to tell us yours, below.
- A gardener with a yard full of rose blooms is constantly harangued by one of her neighbors when the canes reach
over his fence. She wryly says, "he might be afraid of it killing his red-tipped photinias" (highly over planted shrub, here) "or that maybe he is afraid of the thorns catching in his gold chain necklace." She
therapeutically vents this circumstance to audiences at public speaking engagements.
My
thoughts on this: Why would anyone object to FREE roses, tended by someone else .. . I think he should chop down the photinias to reap the roses, instead of complaining.
- Our state's organic "Dirt Doctor" tells one of his favorite 'neighbor stories' at speaking engagements. I shall
attempt to paraphrase from memory. While meeting with other organic investigators to consult on the surrounding ranch lands, they watched a well-used pickup rattle and backfire its way across the field towards
them. Sliding in with a screech and a bang, the door opens. Out of a cloud of dust appears a straw hatted, overall-ed man of girth and chewing tobacco with few teeth, obviously one who works the soil for more
than just esthetics. Reaching out his heavily-callused hand, he booms, "Are you that Orgasmic Dirt Doctor we've been waitin on? Boy am I glad to see you!"
A gardener's neighbors can fall into one of two categories: those that garden and those that don't. Unless they
completely ignore each other (often the case), trouble or friendship will usually occur. Either way, the relationship can develop into either one of gardening friends or gardening foes. When the two
fence-sharers are both sane, generous gardeners, they are fortunate indeed. When a competition ensues, it makes great fodder for this page:
- There is the story about the neighbor buying huge snails from the tropical fish shop and tossing them over the
fence.
- Then the manic who loved her see-through chain-link fence so much, she would sneak into the adjoining yards to cut
down their shrubs that "blocked her air" (more likely her spying view).
- There are numerous accounts of envy-ridden gardeners bombing their neighbor's side yard with herbicides. The worst
culprit fails the conscious-test (sociopath?) when she looks her victim straight in the eye and asks her to share excess perennials with her, as though nothing happened.
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