I bought the old house with the double lot in 1978.
The neighborhood was affordable, which is to say, undesirable. The ambience of the nearby commercial street owed much to iron grates and plywood. There were only three working business establishments, all of them taverns that loudly disgorged their patrons at 2 a.m. That first year, we swept up a lot of broken glass inside. Our new TV walked out after three days. We had our insurance agent’s phone number memorized.
I’d been an apartment dweller, and I was thrilled to have a place all my own. But I kept to myself. I didn’t even want to meet my neighbors. This felt so permanent: What if they were weird? Or chatty? I’d be stuck with them.
Why We Wrote This
As new homeowners in suburban Portland, Oregon, our writer and her spouse loved the privacy afforded by their sprawling laurel. Until they hacked the hedge and opened up their world.
The big side yard was bordered on two sides by a sprawling laurel hedge with Godzilla’s own ambition. It didn’t grow so much as it reared up. I caught one neighbor pouring used motor oil underneath the hedge, but that did nothing to discourage the thing. Within a year it was a threat to migrating geese.
I loved it. My green fortress sealed me off from the street. I could garden all day under its increasingly massive shadow and imagine the world contained just me; my husband, Dave; and my starter set of flowering perennials.
Meanwhile, Dave amused himself by building a 4-foot-tall masonry wall for the front yard, with fancy brick arches and built-in flower boxes. “You know,” he said, squinting, “I could build a wall around the whole property if we took down all that laurel.”
I peered up at the hedge. “Why don’t you solve world hunger first?” I said. But I began to dream of a 7-foot-tall citadel, a haven of brick, a monument to privacy. Slick magazines had been touting the seductions of the “garden room,” an extension of the house with all its promise of seclusion and retreat.
The next few years saw the property values plummet further. Taxes even went down. You could buy any house on the block for 20 grand, and many for less. It made no difference to us, since we had no intention of selling, but that was a lot of fun to bring up in casual conversation 30 years later.
But earnest young people with babies strapped to their chests began to move in all around. Some made art, many made music, and most took turns serving each other coffee in any of several dozen new establishments. A growing number of our neighbors seemed to have few criminal intentions or none at all.
One day Dave whacked the laurel hedge down to sturdy stumps, like dinosaurs fossilized midstride. They leafed out overnight. “You’re never going to get rid of that hedge,” I said. But one day when I was at work, he did, using a chain, our 1969 International Harvester pickup truck in first gear, and a borrowed flatbed. The garden opened up, full of new light. I sketched out new flower beds and meandering paths and decided to eliminate the lawn, which had quickly resprouted everywhere there was dirt.
“You’re never going to get rid of all that grass,” Dave said. But I did.
The price of houses began to seem impossibly high, yet people continued to move in. Baby strollers bloomed on the streets like hope itself. We met new neighbors and wandering strangers while our hedge – our guard – was down.
People approved of the shape the garden was taking. They hailed our progress from the sidewalk. We began to look forward to the boisterous arrival of the woman who strolled by every afternoon walking a bouquet of terriers. Others rested their elbows on our existing wall, gazed into the yard, and commented knowledgeably about soil nutrients and plant combinations. Soon everyone in the neighborhood was on an egg-borrowing basis. Sugar was an easy score, but if you needed a guitar string or a tube of cadmium yellow? Those could be found, too. Dave was generous with his power tools and skills. New young friends were happy to de-bollix our recalcitrant computer.
But we were the universal donors. We owned the pickup truck. Did everyone on the block have a key for it? We didn’t put gas in the truck for years.
One day Dave stood outside with a pencil behind his ear, ready to order block for the new wall.
“So,” he inquired, his arm elevating, “how high do you want it?”
I rested my elbows on his low starter wall. “Right about here,” I said.
