I just flipped to a new month on my calendar, so it must be time to go visit with another neighbor. I knocked on the door at 11011 Overlea, the location of our August Yard of the Month and the home of sisters Chloe Mahler and Angie Howell.
Angie answered and, in the course of our conversation, told me they’ve lived here for just a couple years shy of thirty. Asking if the sisters were into gardening was just a formality. Flowers were all over, and when I noticed the sidewalk border, bursting with vinca in shades of pink, a white flowering plumeria turning the lightest shade of baby pink and a pink-blooming rose bush, I didn’t bother to ask their favorite garden color. What also became apparent was a picture of two people who live with what life brings them and who love to watch beautiful thing spring up wherever nature chooses to put them.
.
Angie said their vinca is so established it re-seeds itself in every cranny and comes back year after year in those varying shades. Their spent poinsettias from Christmases past went, not into the trash, but into the ground where they refresh yearly with seasonal color. She didn’t know, but thinks a bird, wanting in on this action, must have dropped the seeds that became a bush of small, round peppers, so hot that only the birds can eat them. The sisters put a papaya seed into a big pot and got a two foot tree with interesting, jagged, maple-like leaves. She told me one papaya seed had grown to tree-size with large, oblong fruit hanging all over, until a cold front swooped in and took tree and fruit, without them even getting a taste. Chloe and Angie used to sit in their back yard eating store-bought tangerines and spitting the seeds into a nearby flower bed. That yielded two of the best producing, sweet, tangerine trees you’d ever want. If they escape the lawn man's eye, she has three or four new tangerine sprouts, working at becoming trees, one with my name on it. And just as all these things were gifts of nature, the pots of mandevilla were also gifts, but from Chloe’s son.
I decided not to tell her my story of trying to keep our family dog out of the cool, soft greenery and florae that was my flower bed. That dog, slowly, in dog-sized increments, mashed the life out of it, turning it into a series of green, dog-shaped nest. And when it was finally just a flat, packed mat of fading green, hot and hard, the dog without a look back would move along to a fresh spot and repeat the process around the yard.
After trying every trick in the book to keep him out, I had a Grinch of an idea. When it came time to trim back trees and bushes, I cut the limbs into foot-long, pointed stakes and pushed them deep into the ground, every six inches or so, throughout the garden. When the dog was tempted to encircle a nesting spot and try to plop himself down, my wicked, pointy “heart stakes” were there to stop him in midair!
Now deceased, (but I didn’t do it!) that dog was never again able to make my garden into his bed! However, that’s not how the story ends. By springtime my garden was bursting with new growth, but not the colorful kind I was expecting. Every six inches or so, throughout my bed, was a stubby crop of every assorted thing I’d cut into stakes. The moral of the story—the rain falls on the just and the unjust, but ultimately the Grinch will get her due!
Congratulations, Chloe and Angie, on your yard being named August’s Yard of the Month. It’s as if our new Yard of the Month sign was made with you two in mind! Keep up the good work and your charitable attitude, and may your garden always bloom in pink!
I remember when the former residents moved away and Maria and Rafael Ramos moved into the house at 10411 White Clover. The house was always attractive, but it wasn’t long before the yard began to change in a beautiful way, as Maria and Rafael first started adding flower beds and character all around the curving path to the driveway. It’s hard to believe, but their son told me that has been almost 20 years ago, and he thought it was Maria’s mom who inspired her love for gardening. I think Rafael caught that inspiration, too. Well, it was the Ramoses, who, like her mom, and like my former, across-the-street neighbors, Barney and Patsy Boudreaux, inspired me.
Patsy loved interesting and beautiful plantings, and made me, as a young mom of two little boys, want something like that. When the growing boys allowed it to happen, I followed Patsy’s example. Then when the Ramoses started their earliest improvements around that path, it made me also want to do something distinctive, so I added a path with flowers to my driveway. Across the years and even more recently, they’ve raised the bar again! BIG TIME!
The queen and sago palms they put in long ago create a tropical flare, and the new, large, rocks lining the path with beds full of red pentas and chartreuse green potato vine give a lively contrast. They all lead to the porch, hanging with lush, Swedish ivy baskets and to the handsome, wood and leaded glass front door. It’s gorgeous now, and I’ve been there and taken Christmas pictures, and it’s beautiful then, too, and year-round. Very well done, Maria and Rafael!!!
When you put yourself into your home to make it reflect you and be a great place to live and raise your family, keeping it up, making it beautiful, it is a gift to the neighborhood, too, and it can encourage others to follow your example. And it’s so much more than just “keeping up with the Joneses.” It’s being an INSPIRATION! Thank you, Rafael and Maria, for being that to me, and for keeping such a lovely home. Congratulations on being named July’s Yard of the Month!
Dear Neighbors you have been setting your trash out on the wrong days. Tree limb trash pick up was this past Friday for July. Pick up for heavy trash is the second Friday in August. Please make note of these dates. September will be tree limb trash pick up again. If you have trash on the curb remove it until September. Be aware that the Neighborhood Protector will be in the neighborhood and they will write citations for trash on the street curb.