My neighbor Maria and I share a border. It wasn’t always this way.
Our property lines collide halfway up a remarkably steep hill. The bottom half is mine, while the upper half is owned by Maria. Mowing this hill was getting harder and harder for both of us. Maria just turned 50 and I’m 70.
Maria is a terrific neighbor. She has a rain barrel attached to her garage, keeps a small veggie and herb garden, and she lets me know when the local bear is romping through our backyards. We occasionally share a margarita. I couldn’t ask for a better neighbor.
But we were beginning to fuss over the hill because neither one of us wanted to mow it. She has a battery-powered mower that did not have enough oomph to make it up and down the hill. My noisy, gas-guzzling, carbon monoxide-spewing lawn mower didn’t like the hill either. Even mowing lengthwise along the hill had torqued two wheels off my mower.
The physical labor of mowing the hill was so arduous that we were measuring our property line in inches. Neither one of us wanted to mow one more blade of grass than necessary. Sort of like elbow fighting for space in airline seats, except in this case we both wanted less, not more.
I began to hate the hill, even though other neighbors on the street regaled me with childhood memories of sliding down it in winter when they were tots. It became a ridiculous, gut-busting monster of a hill, and all in the name of grass.
I don’t know who came up with the idea first: “Let’s get rid of the grass and make it into one beautiful garden.” Whoever did was a genius, and so was the person who agreed.
We each searched the internet for how to landscape hills, pieced together some ideas and contacted Daniel Pikett, a renowned Renaissance man who has built sheds, decks and stone pathways, and that is just at my house. We asked him for ideas. He pondered. We negotiated on details and agreed.
Maria and I split the cost. When it came right down to it, we gave Daniel free rein; he has a fine artist’s eye. One fall he covered the hillside with cardboard to kill off as much of the grass as possible. When spring arrived, he dug out the remaining grass. He brought in stones the size of the smaller neighborhood bears and he built a gorgeous curving stairway to keep us connected.
We each selected the plants that we especially wanted and over the summer, picked our favorite places to tuck them in. Maria put in sage plants and lavender. I put in a short ornamental grass that flows like a crinoline skirt in the wind.
Now our contentious hill is transformed, no longer a source of drudgery. We are both inclined to forget that it was a property line.
Borders are shared things, or they can be. I’ve never liked fences. I like it when a border is something greater, more beautiful.