She thinks shrubbery should grow in a natural state, with only occasional trimming of the wild or outlying branch.
She hates this:
Like many plantings around our library and city hall, these have been trimmed into these square shapes.
I must agree with her: they don't look natural.
But still, they're kind of neat.
I call them Beverly Hills yard work because of a walk I took in that tony area of Greater Los Angeles once many years ago.
I was in town for a convention but decided one day to take a walk around in the residential enclave to see what was there.
(At the time I had lived all of my life in the Dakotas and this Beverly Hills was pretty strange in appearance to me.)
I was walking along, checking out the big mansions but also marveling at the lawns and the shrubbery, all of which looked to me like they had been manicured with a nail clippers.
Imagine the surprise of this naive North Dakota boy when a police car pulled up beside me and an officer asked me just what I thought I was doing.
We had a conversation, I think he looked at my driver's license, saw that I was from Dakota and politely informed me that this was an exclusive conclave and people got nervous about some stranger walking around looking at the big houses.
Even though I was dressed in a suit and tie.
But I guess my attire and manner pegged me as . . . . . a square.
Some times it's good to be a square.