4 -~ Sunday, May 10, 1987 - North Shore News

SPRING — and in older
dude’s fancy turns to his
yard.

It is the same thing every
year. The yard that I thought
was so perfect last summer
looks tacky.

“It looks perfectly fine to
me,’’ my wife argues nervously.

She’s the one who keeps
track of the bills. This has
nothing to do with sexism. |
simply can’t add.

According to her, there’s an
enormous bulge in the house-
hold spending account every
year about this time. A lot of
bills from the garden shop and
the lumber yard and the
mechanic.

1 bow my head sheepishly.
It’s true. An irresistible impulse
to transform the yard overtakes
me every spring, and there's
nothing I can do to resist it.
Except go broke, | suppose.

You would think that Jand-
scaping was cheap. First of all,
nothing is cheap nowadays ex-
cept talk. Second, the price of
grass seed alone is enough to
drive a gardener to take up
lucrative work, like being a
premier or something.

This is my eighth spring in
the same permanent residence.
Each year, I have done some-
thing different with the yard. It
has never stayed the same for
two summers in a row.

Come to think of it, I did this
with every house J ever lived in
as an adult. Yet as a kid, who
could have cared a hoot about
gardening?

I think it’s strictly what they
call adult stuff. Peculiar, eh?

Each year, there has been
some particular landscaping
project that stands out as a
symbol of a certain period of
my life, as I’m sure it does for
everybody else involved.

There was, for instance, the
clearing-away of the mighty
hemlocks which were blocking
the sun from the sundeck by
late afternoon,

A friend with a background
in logging volunteered to do the
job for us. Bringing over a
chainsaw, he took out the
clothes line as well as the trees,
but then we had a dryer by that
time anyway. Didn't need the
clothes line....

One year, my teenage son
and | decided (well, { decided),
to build a stone wall across the
stream, lugging rocks from all
over the yard. We went through
two cheap wheelbarrows,
testing to see which one of us

Bob Hunter

® strictly personal @

was stronger, and by fall we
had half a dam in place and a
decent, if awesomely cold,
wading pool.

The winter rains left the pool
area entirely filled with rocks
and sand.

On to the next project.

It has to be a primitive reflex,
this urge that comes with the
warming of the sun’s rays, the
lengthening of the day.

One ycar I put in a garden
that left us with so many
vegetables that they were still
taking up space in their neat lit-
tle plastic bags in the freezer
three years later.

Another year, 1 got inte
flowers. We ended up with
rhododendron bushes all over
the place, fast-growing roses
whose thorns lash at you every
time you go near, fruit trees
that get pillaged by the birds
virtually within one night after
the fruit appears, some new
willows that have basically had
the biscuit, pampas grass
planted where there’s too much
shade, and so on.

This isn't exactly big news. It
is the very smallness of it that
gives it its meaning. This is your
personal garden, the environ-
ment in which you tread when
you are home. it has to feel
right.

So, between the rising
temperatures of spring and the
adult human mammal! impulse
to establish territory, one turns
to one’s own little empire, and
tinkers like a mini-god.

This year’s project involves
turning everything into lawn. It
is my Lawn Phase. The yard
must be a smoothly-shaved pool
table of green. Nothing can be
allowed to obstruct the max-
imum golf course effect, haw-
ever humble the scale.

What this means is anybody’s
guess.

Could it be insecurity? Is it a
mere human variation on the
theme of tomcat’s staking out
their turf? We have here, very
definitely, a case of the ter-
titorial imperative still at work
in modern society. Astounding,
but true!

Of course, it’s therapy, too.
Most of us post-Information
Age people (anybody with an
answering machine) like to go
tub our fingers in the dirt every
now and then, The only place 1
don’t mind kneeling, actually,
is in a garden.

Then there is the Zen of it all,
of which to speak would be to
not speak.

What more can I say?

Writer Lowry focus
of UBC symposium

FOR I4 years, writer Malcolm
Lowry lived in a shack sear
Dolfarton in North Vancouver.

It was here that he completed
work on his book Under the
Volcano.

A three-day UBC symposium on
Lowry, which begins Monday,
concludes with a guided bus tour
to the North Shore, where a Lowry
memorial will be unveiled in
Cates Park.

Lowry lived here from £940 to
1954,

Organizers of the symposium
said this is the first international
symposium to be held on Lowry. It

runs until May 13.

Prograrn highlights include a
keynote address by Canadian poet
and novelist Robert Kroetsch, a
North American premiere of
British composer Graham Collier’s
Lowry-inspired jazz, film screen-
ings and two publisher’s recep-
tions.

Participants in the program are
coming from Europe, Australia,
New Zealand, Japan, Mexico, the
United States and from itcross
Canada.

Members of the general public
are invited to register for the sym-
posium. The registration fee is $80,
$15 for students and seniors.

‘Booze who' on
the North Shore

RECENT CONVICTIONS in : "

North Shore courts have resulted G ¥ : Superbeds
in the following fines and penalties a Ne

for drinking and driving related ; ‘ee : S x
offences. Mandatory ficence

suspension is in addition to 3

published penalties. * $52 1 Year

NORTH VANCOUVER [3 membership
COURTS: Robert Johnsen, 206- }; % 6 ae
130 East Queens, North Vancouver
(over .08, 15 days jail); Leonard
Kelly Tommy, of no fixed address,
(over .08, 14 days jail); Richard
Allan Winslow, 329-229 West 2nd
Street, North Vancouver, (im-
paired, $500); Andrew Robert
William Vanderlaars, 130 East
Kings Road, North Vancouver,
(impaired, $500); Terry Melcom
Guenther, 412 East 9th Street,
North Vancouver, (over .08, $700);
Gerrit Willem Wunderink, 308-215
St. Andrews Avenue, North Van-

couver, (over .08, $500); Daniel SU GH E

Garret O'Connor, 11-149 West N iN

19th Street, North Vancouver,

oer tise kona cos | © TANNING STUDIOS
Kirk, 1387 Lynn Valley Road, [|
North Vancouver, (impaired,

$500); John Claude Geffroy, 204- 1448 W. Broadway 347 Bewicke 825 Bute
321 East’ 2nd Street, North Van- N. VAN. (at Robson)
couver, (over .08, $400); Kenneth 84-8

William Eagle, 1343 Chartwell 9 881 685-1027

Drive, West Vancouver, (over .08, (RRR RR{RSt pep yerecragem penne carrer e rea SE
anemones - VANCOUVER'S NAME IN: INDOOR-TANNIN(
314-555 West 28th Street, Van-

couver, (over -08, $300).

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