"Doug Kanter" wrote in message
...

The way some people "think" about their yards is truly bizarre. My
neighbor
across the street has done a pretty nice job of landscaping. It's the type
of setup you'd expect from a guy who doesn't really like plants THAT much,
so it's designed for minimal maintenance. Not sterile, but plants that
need
little attention. Then, last week, he started applying that hideous,
artificially colored red mulch. :-) We got to talking and he asked if I
wanted some extra mulch. I commented that I didn't like the red stuff. His
response: "I know it's not natural looking, but when people see it, it's
obvious that someone's been landscaping".


Yep. I have one of this type a few doors up the street. The people are
compulsively neat, which isn't a bad thing really, but their yard looks like
it came out of a box. It is so sterile and uninteresting. To make matters
worse, they use that red volcanic rock mulch. I'm waiting for the plastic
shrubs.

The people I don't understand are the ones who obviously don't like yard
care, but do things to make their life more complex. These people don't
like to mow or trim, but will dig a 18 inch bed, seemingly randomly, in the
middle of their lawn and plop down something ridiculous. One person put in
a perennial geranium in the middle of a sizable corner lot. What's that
about? Another woman planted several small trees in very strange locations,
all of which are either too close to her house or the sidewalk. Oh well,
she'll be gone in a couple of years and it will be someone else's problem.
In the meantime I sure it just reinforces her position that mowing on a
regular basis is just too damn hard. Sadly, many of these people are single
moms with teenagers. For some reason the kids are never required to help.
Maybe I grew up in an unusual household, but I was required to do all the
routine landscaping chores such as mowing, trimming, and hedge maintenance.
Since my uncle was disabled in WWII, I also had to care for his yard.