Meditation Upon A Landscape

Consider:





No weeds, no stray wisps of folige, no trash. A couple of guys moved here all the way from Mexico to maintain this. Stark white stucco, bare dirt stripped by swift rakes of all life-enriching humus. Greasy asphalt.

Naturally graceful, normally billowy Podocarpus gracilior here unnaturally dwarfed, buzzed via smog-belching two-stroke engined reciprocating clippers into rigid asymentric rectangles, like hammerheads poised to smash that row of baby Aeoniums. Aeoniums with plaintive little arms, ask for mercy. It has a tipsy geometric dignity to it, this wild imbalance of scale, and the power of simplicity.

The Podocarpus are the survivors of the original plantings while the Aeoniums are new. Those Podocarpus are tough bastards. The Mexicans who buzz them are tough, too. They came all the way here from Michoacán or Guerrero to feed the family back home. This is how they do it.

Those tough bastard Podocarpus root systems will eventually crack the sidewalk and buckle the asphalt. No, it won't be revenge for what we've done to them. They will just be searching for water and nutrients. They will just want to continue.

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