…is paved with good intentions, or good neighbours.
When I arrived at our Christchurch townhouse it was nearly midnight. My flight out of Auckland had been delayed, then delayed again. Two flights, one cancellation, one major delay. I think Air NZ has some significant underlying problems. But I made it, caught an Uber, pulled my pack and wine red cello case out of the back seat and went to key in the code of our lock box.
Huh? The lock box was bare of vegetation rather than being screened by the pelargonium leaves and their shedding scarlet flowerheads. Was I at the right place? I looked up and my wooden seagull stared down with its skeptical beady eye. Right place. No plants.
I looked closer to see stubs of pelargonium stalk. They’d been chopped back to close to non-existent from the profusion of leaves I had left the last time (while noting I’d need to cut them back a bit when they finished flowering). The other seven town houses have regimented gardens, with lavenders or yuccas in a row. I quietly gloried in the messiness of our flowers planted by the previous owner, contained within a box hedge to approximate respectability. No more.
I was so livid I sent a text message to the chair of the body corporate, a likely contender to have ‘tidied up’ our garden bed. It’s never a good idea to text after midnight following a long day of workshopping. That didn’t stop me. The next morning I received a defensive reply saying the bodycorp chair and another of the townhouse owners had done us a favour by tidying up our garden bed. Apparently several townhouse owners were asking when we would do our own tidying, so the two thought they’d be helpful.
When the other townhouse owner dropped round later in the day to apologise, I explained how different people’s ideas of beauty are. One of my definitions of beauty is something that looks at least a little wild and free. Squared off hedges and plants in rows are not innately beautiful to me (that includes vineyards – I puzzle over why people think that identical tortured-looking plants on wires in repeating rows with bare earth beneath them are beautiful). These townhouse owners’ definition of beauty is more aligned with ‘in control’. I’m the person with my identical spice jars carefully labelled and in alphabetical order so I do get it, sort of, but that’s not how I prefer living things to be trammelled.
The bodycorp chair dropped in to say she was sorry, too, and that they really meant to be helpful because they were doing a job they thought we didn’t have time to do. So we are all living happily again (for the meantime at least, until Chris and I breach the next unspoken rule). And I have gone out and bought a bunch of miniature agapanthus in white and blue which will stay tidily within the bounds of the bed, will not wildly leap up the walls, and will not shed flower petals on the pavement. I might even plant them in rows.
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