This blog is about my garden and about the little village I live in.
I grew up in a house surrounded by forest, but we never had a garden. The two rose bushes we planted one Easter disappeared by summer. We suspected our neighbor Tony. (Tony was notorious as a plant thief among the neighborhood. We had no evidence to support our claim - just the coincidence of disappearing plants reappearing in his ever-growing garden.) Those disappearing rosebushes broke our hearts. After that failed attempt at gardening, we never tried again. I guess we thought it was useless to invest time and effort in something that you would never get to see bloom, that could just run off one night. I still feel that way about dogs and teenagers.
I live in Los Angeles now. I've lived here a decade. I own a 1912 Craftsman house that I've recently renovated top to bottom. Most of the houses in this neighborhood were built in the teens and twenties. This is one of the oldest neighborhoods of Los Angeles. These houses were built as middle management homes for studio employees. Paramount Studios is just a bike ride away. Watch an old silent film and you'll see local street signs as Buster Keaton is chased by the Keystone Cops or tries to make off with someone else's furniture.
Larchmont Village is one block of shops; not really a village at all. People are always looking for places to gather in Los Angeles, a sprawling isolated city connected by agents that promise, "I can get you work if you move out here," superhighways and subways that like so many dreams - go nowhere. Larchmont Village, with four coffee shops and a dozen restaurants, is a place to gather, a place to stroll with your baby, take a yoga class, buy a six dollar ice cream or two hundred dollar t-shirt. We live adjacent to Larchmont Village; It's just an eight block walk. And because the weather is sunny here three hundred and sixty-three days a year, I have a garden - a fenced in garden with a locked gate.
It's home.
