Mid-April - 1994

I don’t want to be too harsh on the garden or give you the impression that this was a bundle of weeds out my front door, far from it. When we moved in, we saw the lushest array of plants I’d seen since the botanical gardens. The front yard was alive with a riot of flowers (love that expression) in every color and shape imaginable. Gigantic Matilija Poppies at 7 feet with what look like fried eggs atop each, gigantic purple plumes of what we came to call Dr. Suess Plant, blue and white rosemary, 15 different kinds of heirloom roses, canna lilies, ginger, magnolia flowers, acacias, hibiscus, lavenders, love-in-a-mist, borage, oleander... It’s not a big yard, but every part of it was covered in blooms that April. Butterflies floated through our path as we brought moving boxes in the front door, bees swarmed the blues and reds, drunk with nectar, and hummingbirds dove through the foliage at speeds I thought unimaginable. We moved in at just the right time, spring.

That first weekend I took my coffee and sat on the wood bench in the front yard, writing. I thought, “Now I’ve really made it. A house of my own, a garden of my own.” After growing up as an Air Force brat and living for years among the expatriates of Los Angeles, it felt like I was finally at home.

I was at home. But it wasn’t going to be as simple as just sitting there with my cup of coffee and drinking up the cool spring morning.

Endings like that are for movies and books.

And we know better than to believe those, right?

April -1994

Javier Montes, who would come to be our gardener for 11 years, came and introduced himself to Wendy while she was still unboxing her stuff and getting my crap out of the hallways and wherever else I had dropped it before going back for more at my apartment. Javier, like many Angelenos, came to this city after growing up somewhere else. In his case it was the region of Mexico named Zacatecas. When he showed up at the door, Wendy was in grubby jeans and t-shirt, after having sweated through moving the bed from one side of the room to another, seeing which way looked best. Javier, on the other hand, was dressed impeccably in a shirt and tie, black hair and mustache slicked back, which we came to know as his Realtor Look. Kind of a roll reversal, I might add. Javier also sells real estate, or tries to, to the mostly Spanish speaking population of nearby Silverlake, Echo Park, and Eagle Rock. From what I gather he’s not incredibly successful, but he does enough to have an office number at a local realty agency and the chutzpah to ask once every 3 months if we are interested in selling our house.

But on the day he came by he was inquiring whether or not we’d be keeping him as the gardener. We’d never questioned it. He’d kept the garden for years and he obviously knew how to keep it, it seemed insane to let him go and try to decipher what the hell was going on out in the front yard ourselves. Our plumbing was already backed up and the bedroom was the color of green we came to call “vomit”, so we already had our work cut out for us.

Wendy and he shook on it, and there we had it, for $80 a month we would have someone to take one more chore off our hands. It seemed a bargain.

Well, it would have been a bargain if Javier took care of the whole garden from top to bottom. But he didn’t. To be honest, unless someone was actually living in a hut in our front yard and working in the soil while the sun was shining, we could never even dream of having this chore off our hands. We quickly learned that Javier is the standard “mow, blow, and go” gardener that homeowners know all-too-well. 80 bucks for four visits, I don’t know quite what we were expecting for $20 a week. But we got the standard watering, mowing, ear-splitting gas blower, a lot of raking, and a hearty Hi-O, Silver. It seemed like enough until we realized many of the plants were dying or in various stages of dying. An investigation of the drip irrigation system, poorly placed all across the walking paths revealed why: none of the damn system worked.

Drip irrigation systems (which were developed in the deserts of the Middle East) are a series of large tubes leading to smaller tubes leading to tiny emitters which spray onto the roots of specific plants, thus delivering water where it’s needed, but not the surrounding weeds. It sounds like a brilliant idea, and it is. But you have to keep in mind that this was probably one of the first non-commercial versions of this system and, like the first version of almost anything, it needed a lot of TLC. Okay, that’s being kind. This system sucked. It also revealed that Paul, the landscape architect who laid this oasis out, decided that his drip system should call the shots with plant’s watering needs instead of common sense. If he could deliver precise amounts of water to cacti and thirsty rose bushes (because he placed them on two different systems), why not stick them right by each other? Brilliant! Yes, brilliant indeed. You wouldn’t do such a thing, clueless, because you could end up selling the house and my girlfriend could go on a rampage against your decrepit Israeli-made piece of crap system and rip out all the hoses before we made any sense of them.

I’m not sure whether we were more screwed before or after the hoses were piled into the driveway roasting in the midday heat, ready to be chucked in the dumpster. But the fact was, we were pretty well screwed.

Day 1 - April, 1994

This will take place in the past. This much you should know.

My wife (then girlfriend), Wendy, and I moved into this house on a sunny day in 1994, probably one of the nicest houses on the street on a wide, Los Angeles boulevard.

We had been going out for a little over a year, but had been friends long before - 5 years? She had the money then and bought the house. She promised me a month's free rent if I moved in with her. How could I resist?

The house itself was built for a doctor and his family in 1927 in an area of Los Angeles known as Atwater Village, abutting the infamous Los Angeles River itself. A beautiful Spanish Colonial with brown saltillo tiles lining the roof and cupola, curious angles and arches inside, and the garden. My god, the garden.

Two men who lived here before we did, one of them, Paul, was a landscape architect. The house sits on a slight incline on the corner. Houses in our neighborhood aren't known for their big back yards (I'm thinking of my Mother's tiny one and my Dad's non-existent ones in South Philly) but the corner houses were moved clear back to the lot, leaving a wide expanse of lawn to cover the front. That wide expanse wasn't good enough for the landscaper, though. He tore all the grass out and put in plants. And plants. And plants. When we moved in, there must have been 125 different plants out front. Since he'd moved out after his lover had died, his mother had been taken care of the place for a few years. And we found what was left of the drip irrigation system out front. (But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

Wendy had heard over the years how much I loved nature and the outdoors. We would go for walks in the mountains, in Joshua Tree, and through botanical gardens and I'd tell her how amazed I was what I couldn't only call "God's work". What I didn't know was when she began her search for a house that a garden would be a good selling point.

And this was more garden then I'd ever seen before.

We loved it, though and were relaxed once we'd met Javier, Paul's gardener. Thank God, we said, at least there's someone to take care of all this.

Man were we wrong.

By Way of Introduction

This whole thing was going to be a book, see? Then, after several months of trying in vain to sit down and write it, it became a loose series of journal pages and Word documents, all loosely grouped under the title “Frustrated Gardener”.

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Author’s Note

I did not intend on becoming a gardener, much the same way most people did not originally plan on working in middle management, talking all day about the widget industry, or becoming the janitor at their old high school. There’s a famous saying, “Some are born into greatness and others have greatness thrust upon them”, well you could just as easily say, “Some are born into gardening while others have gardening thrust upon them.”

This, my friend, is a tale of the latter.

You start out as a writer in a hovel in Venice, CA, and spending too many late nights in Tiny Naylor’s Diner listening to Talking Heads and filling reams upon reams of notebook pages until 4 AM every weekend, then you wake up one day to find yourself in a ground war to extract the last of the spent California Poppies from your yard while trying to make sure your son doesn’t run into the street.

It’s amazing how that this sort of stuff happens while you’re not paying attention, isn’t it?

I’m not complaining, far from it. I was fairly unhappy back there at Tiny Naylor’s (it may have had something to do with their weak coffee) and many times I find myself in the garden speaking to an unseen audience on such subjects as How to Weed without Hating Yourself and the Rest of the World; Hey, Ho, Where Did My Trowel Go?; and Wow, I’m Actually Learning to Like the Smell of Rotting Compost.

The audience has always been you. At least I hope it’s been you, because otherwise those 5+ years of therapy didn’t really pay off. And someone at Cigna is going to come looking for me.

What I’m saying is, if you meet me at a party, please don’t tell me you put down my book because you just couldn’t take the whining, crying, and bellyaching. I was counting on you to listen to all my drivel so I could go back into my house and not take it out on my wife, my children, and my incredibly cheap bottles of red wine.

You don’t become a frustrated gardener in a day.

Wait, actually you do.

So scratch that. It takes a long time to become a contented gardener. A wise gardener who knows the secrets to saving heirloom tomato seeds and dispenses advice over back fences like ATMs dole out 20 dollar bills.

Apparently, I’m not even halfway there, as I’m still having trouble raising large tomato plants I bought in four inch pots and forget the common and botanical names of plants the moment someone points at something in my yard and says, “What’s that called?”

So if you were looking for that book, please put this one down. I’m not kidding, I don’t want you coming up to me at Trader Joe’s and complaining that it’s not worth the $11.95 or whatever the hell you spent on this (of which I’m getting a nickel, so you can tell it’s REALLY not worth it to me). If that’s what you were looking for then pick up Rodales or Sunset, or, if you live in Southern California, Robert Smaus’ excellent book on growing plants out here. Those people won’t let you down.

I, on the other hand, am a dabbler, a procrastinator, and a guy who has no idea why it is you can plant four identical Mexican Sages in a row and three will do beautifully and one will die.

However, if you were looking to feel better about your own shortcomings as a gardener and maybe even as a human being, then you’ve come to the right place, fella (or ma’am).

I will guaranteed in this long intro that I have wounded, killed, or set fire to four times as many plants as you have. And am still chastising myself about it. (Mostly because Catholic guilt, much like a virus, never seems to go away.)

So this may be the very key to cheering you up.

Go ahead, I could use the nickels.

Tim Donnelly