Gardening was a challenging topic at my childhood home. I was embarrassed. The neighbors seemed blessed with some magic that let them have tidy lawns, trimmed hedges, shade trees shaped just so, and little rows of neatly cultivated flowering annuals in rich, dark, weedless soil. I probably should have been more focused on their cars, portfolios, or daughters—and eventually I was—but for a while there, I envied those lush fuchsia baskets and perfect dichondra lawns. I clued in eventually, and realized the neighbors’ gardening secret was money—and lots of hired help that looked suspiciously like my father’s side of the family.
Over at our house, it was a little looser. We tended to either leave things alone or hack away at them until they just gave up and died. But what survived was often pretty—or at least fascinating. We were on land that had been occupied by verdant Southern California orange groves; the soil was a bit high in clay, but with enough water, anything you stuck in the ground would grow like a weed—still does. We proved that point by growing lots of weeds. For a brief stint in high school, I proved it by actually growing weed. But that’s another story, filed under “minor, ’70s, bored, and broke.”
The major landscape features at our house were a monstrous carob tree and two hedges.
The carob stood easily three times as tall as our house, and it formed a perfect giant orb rising from a thick, branchless trunk. It put out thousands of flower fronds all summer. These fronds looked to me like stiff little six-inch Christmas trees, complete with little, bitty balls. They stuck straight out from the smaller branches, in places where other plants wouldn’t have flowers. When the carob went into bloom, the tree hummed like an engine all day with millions of feasting insects. You could hear it from way down the block: ants, bees, bumblebees, wasps large and small—even flies got into the act. At night, especially when the moon was bright, the smell was stinky-sweet enough to keep you awake. I was forbidden to climb it because once up past the trunk, I’d always scramble to dangerous heights. When I did dare to climb it, I’d come back with smudged bugs, a few stings, rough bark scrapes, and near permanent orange sap stains ground into my skin and clothing.
