Good Neighbors

Robert Frost advised us that ‘good fences make good neighbors,’ but I beg to differ. I have fences on three sides of my property and it turns out that judging the neighbors is not so easy, even when I consider myself one of the neighbors, which I am, of course, since I'm their neighbor. It turns out that I’m one of the bad ones, despite an excellent fence. In this particular situation, the nature of the neighbors is deeply affected by whether they have a truly noxious weed that they are making available to those who are nearest, if not necessarily dearest, to them.

Bad neighbor that I am, it is because I have bindweed on my property and it is escaping to the neighbor to the north. I have been working on eradicating the bindweed (a class B noxious weed) for over eight years. It is one tough customer. It has roots that run very deep and up to six feet long. They may be forty feet long for all I know, but the longest one I ever dug up was about six feet. Usually, they break off before I get more than a foot or two. Bindweed is also called wild morning glory. It is a white convolvulus and looks just like a small morning glory that goes on forever. Its root survives everything. There are stories of uprooted bindweed left on a piece of board in the sun that, weeks later was still willing to put out roots when placed in a moist environment. My own weak attempt at a solution is to put roots, flower, and stems all in a large black plastic bag which I close and leave in the sun for a few weeks or months until we are burning garden debris that can’t/shouldn’t be composted. Then I empty the bag’s contents on the hot fire. I think it’s dead at that point. I can't be sure, though; it's possible that what I have created is powdered bindweed (mix with water and...).

But still, despite eight years of steady and industrious work, I still have some bindweed, mostly in the center of our property where it is harming only me. But a new front has opened up on the northern edge and I am struggling to contain it before it moves through the chainlink fence to the neighbors’ immaculately groomed yard. Fortunately, there is a considerable expanse of paved driveway that it must make it across--after the fence--before it can become well established in their yard. Unless, of course, it goes under the concrete, which means that they will have it for eight years or forever. Distressing. I can hardly face them and it doesn’t help that they don’t speak a lot of English and I of course (a good American!) speak none of their language. The complexities of my apologies may not get through, I fear; perhaps not even what it is that I am apologizing for. When I crouch by the fence uprooting handfuls of bindweed, they look sympathetically at me, while I feel sympathy for them...but what to say?

On the other hand, my neighbors to the west have for years been feeding bindweed on to my property and I have not yet responded by threatening to set their house on fire or calling the Washington State Noxious Weed Authority. It is a rented house and the California owners have tended to rent to people who have reached the age of majority but not the age of either good sense or good neighborliness. Mostly, they have reached the age of loud music on weekend nights, the pulsing bass still felt long after the more ‘melodic’ parts have finished.

However, a new regime has just been instituted in the rental house and the owner’s post-retirement age father has come to restore order. He mows the bindweed regularly, he mows the blackberries regularly, he mows everything that grows regularly and assures me that, other than grass, he has no interest in planting anything. That’s okay with me (although I had fond visions of our sharing the border between our property with a much larger raspberry patch that he would tend when I am not in residence), as long as the bindweed stops coming at me.

The bad side of all this, though, is that now I have to work on keeping the bindweed his predecessors allowed through into my western yard from going back to his eastern yard. And there is the other problem on the northern border. It would be so much easier if all good neighborliness took was a fence. Clearly, Frost didn’t have bindweed on his acreage.