They're Back...

So last week I was washing out my coffee filter at the kitchen sink and I looked out the window and there they were. At the base of the tree in the middle of the hedge of the lot next door. Spindly legs up in the air and her privates open to view except for the bits you couldn't see because of the man on top of her and at first I thought it was a hooker, because sometimes we get those. But it wasn't. It's a couple, somewhat the worse for the wear, and they're living in the hedge.

They're not hedgehogs, nossirreebob. They share. There are probably six or seven people living in that hedge this week. And at night they laugh and talk and fight and the sound of their voices comes through our windows in a code of cheap liquor and Finesse and grunting.

Some people might find this distressing, having the lot next door become a gypsy encampment. I don't find it nearly as distressing as having the amaryllis bulbs stolen from our front deck this week. They were nicely arranged in a shallow planter - three sets of bulbs placed so the leaves would overlap. And the planter was on the table beside the clay tray full of cacti. Whoever took them didn't like cacti. I checked the back yard and they didn't take the plumeria either.

We live in a neighbourhood where people seem to think plants are common property, even the ones in the garden plots or the planters. We have one neighbour who outright asks to take stuff - I gave her several amaryllis last year. And this year half our peony blooms were stolen. Our solution is to try and plant enough stuff that a certain percentage of loss won't really affect things much. We have lots of white yarrow. No-one steals the yarrow.

When I lived at the Rockwood, it was the same. Someone dug up my carefully nursed opuntia, grown from seed and thriving in a small way in the parking lot. Someone dug up my daylily. They just come and dig them up and take them away. All the oxalis from my plot at Our Urban Eden. You never know what will appeal to the plant thieves.

It's not the gypsies next door who are doing the stealing. They don't have gardens or windowsills for these plants. Besides, we'd see the plants out there under the hedge.