148 Days In - Tuesday is Gardening Day

On Tuesdays most of the neighbours are visited by their gardeners. Our residence gets its garden treatment on a Wednesday, but for some reason Tuesday is the chosen day for most others who live in this community.

From early in the morning, pick-up-trucks of varying colour, age and condition line the streets; balanced all around the edge are brooms and rakes, ladders and shears, hoses and leaf blowers. The gardeners are invariably immigrants. This comment should be taken as a fact - not racism!

I do not wish to confuse people; I know that the frustration of 69 Days In was that not enough stock is put in the importance of gardens. But I lamented over wide open spaces, and rolling lawns with children playing gaily. Here we have beds with flowers, shrubs and perfectly rounded bushes. And the reason that I know what all the neighbours gardens are like is because they are not within the confines of their property, but out on the verge, so those wandering past can see how pretty they keep their land, but they can’t themselves appreciate it from the comfort of their home.

One morning when it was cool enough to run, I pass a man up a ladder cutting random bits off a tree. Further down the hill a couple of guys chat in Spanish as they pull dead bits out of leafy shrubs. On my way home, they are still in the same places, doing the same thing. I can’t help wondering how much they are paid. I bet it is more than being a background artist!

You see, the gardening isn’t (like the gardens aren’t) quite the same as back home. If you leave sections of our green-and-pleasant-land alone, wild plants will grow in abundance; here the land is desert, and if left alone, returns to it’s natural form. Great Britain hums with conversations of which rose is now growing in this or that garden, grown men talk passionately about the British trees and are brought almost to tears at the thought of rising temperatures changing the native greenery.

So I like to think that if I hired a gardener in the UK, they would be doing the job because they were passionate about it, because they liked to watch things grow, to bring art to the outside portion of people’s homes.

Most Tuesday mornings, the most common sight is two gardeners outside of each property: one wears a pack on his back - not unlike those found on ghost-busters - but the nozzle blows at the leaves he waves it dispassionately towards; the second holds either rake, or hose, and assists the first in his arduous, skilful job of getting rid of dead leaves.

It does not come as a surprise to me, then, that once these workers have left for the week, if you look closely the façade of their work is only thin, and the rogue twigs/leaves/branches really can spoil the intended effect.

Everyone here has an opinion about Los Angeles - some might take the gardening as some sort of metaphor.