August, 2017 Yard of the Month

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!