Opinion: Parking-strip paradise, sidewalk superbloom (via latimesopinion )
Mine is not a private garden, like those of English aristocrats or wealthy Americans, hidden behind tall gates and hedges. It’s a superbloom for my community.
I’ve been out weeding all spring, with my hula hoe and my bare hands. My mother taught her kids to pull hard on dandelions, mustard weed, purslane and wild foxtails. “Get the roots out or you’ll have to come back next week and do the same place again.” She meant that she’d make us do it again. When my husband and I bought this house, in April 1988, my mother brought her purple iris bulbs, and my father-in-law brought his yellow iris bulbs.
My mother is Swiss, a tidy perfectionist who planted annuals and vegetables in rows and never ever let things go to seed. No mess. She was appalled at the system my girls and I developed. I planted one six-pack of red Flanders poppies inside the fence my husband built along the sidewalk. Children love seed packets — by the handful, mine added larkspur, love-in-a-mist and Italian sunflowers in all colors — white, orange, yellow, red.
Inez had given me the hula hoe years earlier, her favorite. Every afternoon, I hoed the strip like a farmer. Then I swept the seeds fallen to the sidewalk from the flowers inside the fence out to the bare patches by the street.
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