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sandl_gw

Favorite Garden Horror Story?

SandL
19 years ago

Albeit, this was after my mom sold our house (when I was a kid). We had lived in a large Spanish style house atop a hill overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Ventura County, CA. During the years my mom had decked the grounds out with these lovely, tall junipers between large arched dining room windows and a huge avacado tree in the front. It was THE BEST for climbing when you wanted to avoid getting a spanking and for when you wanted a view of the whole neighborhood. At any rate, she made sure the plants modeled the Spanish feel of the house.

When she sold it it was to an oriental man. One day we decided to drive by our old house only to discover everything had been bonzaied! I mean EVERTHING! even the avacado tree! Those lovely branches that once carried my brother and I to the lofty heights of that great tree were gone. In a word, the tree looked like it had a fro. Needless to say, our jaws dropped.

I no longer live in California, but when I do chance to make it back, I sometimes drive by our old house on the hill for nostalgia reasons. The effects of the bonzai massacre have slowly died away, but the avacado tree will never be the same.

Heather

Comments (3)

  • sylviatexas1
    19 years ago

    No takers?

    Nobody wanna to think about it?

    Me, neither, but here's a story, although not a horror story:

    I once had a roommate who was the baby in the family, the only sister of 4 brothers.

    When she was very small, her parents worked in the city, but her grandparents still lived on their farm.

    Her brothers had spent summers with the grandparents before, but this was little Evelyn's first "farm" summer.

    Their grandmother told the boys to watch their little sister while they planted black-eyed peas in the garden.

    Well, once they taught Evelyn how to plant peas, they went off to find more entertaining pastimes, leaving her with a whole bag of seed peas to plant.

    *Hours* went by, & her grandmother,
    looking out the kitchen window,
    saw that little Evelyn was still out there,
    patiently planting those peas:

    She would take one out of her sack,
    examine it carefully,
    poke a hole with a stick,
    look at the pea again,
    & carefully place the pea in the hole.

    Then she would eye it once more,
    sometimes poking at it a little,
    & finally she would *very* gently cover it up.

    The grandmother went to the garden to confer.

    "Evelyn, are you planting peas?"

    "Yes, Gramma."

    "You sure are looking at them a long time."

    "Well, yes, Gramma!
    It's very important to do it the right way:
    You have to look at 'em *real* close to be sure to plant them with the little black part on the bottom,
    so they'll grow right side up."

  • kab121170
    19 years ago

    In my first house, I lovingly created some great landscaped beds all around the house. The front of the house had some pyrocantha, red twigged dogwood, daylilies, sedum, coral bells, climbing roses etc... and the side had a lovely shade garden with hostas, ferns astilbe, lamium, bleeding heart, etc... (Several of the hostas and daylilies were names and their starts were expensive). The year after I bought the house, I returned to the city the house was in. I decided to drive by my old house. The perennial beds had been ripped out. The front was landscaped with boxwood and rocks. The shade garden was resodded. I keep telling myself that they must have given the plants away to a good home, but I have a knot in the pit of my stomach that says that they were trashed (not even composted).

    When I moved this last time, I potted up many of my favorite plants before I put the house on the market. I replaced them inthe garden with divisions from some of my more common plants.

  • dogpatchlady
    19 years ago

    There's nothing favorite about this, but it was a gardening horror. Actually happened twice. We lived on Galveston island, in a house on stilts, like you see in so many shots after a hurricane. We had two storms that caused super high tides and put 2 feet of sea water over my entire yard for 2 days. It killed almost everything, including the earthworms. The weight of the water compressed the nice soil I'd spent so much effort enhancing. Two huge hibiscus and a crepe myrtle came back from the roots. This is not near as bad as what's happened recently in FL, but it was a gardening nightmare for me.

    I learned the hard way never to go back and look at homes where you used to live. It's always a downer. Better to remember it the way it was. JMO

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