Getting With The Program

Copied from HOA TALK Home Page, courtesy of the Denver Post

Will miracles never cease! My garden has been awarded May's "Yard of the month" by my neighborhood homeowners association. A sign for all to see was hammered into the rock garden by the mailbox. (My husband, Randy, has since moved said sign to a fenceline where less- fragile plants reside.) Why the surprise? Ours is a covenant-controlled suburban community. Mine is not, by anyone's definition, a typical tidy suburban yard.

In 1987, I read the tome-length covenants that were provided at the signing to see what I could and could not do to my new property. Changing the color of our home required board approval. With a lot that borders open space, a privacy fence was forbidden, as were clotheslines and compost bins. OK with the first two, I requested and got special dispensation to replace the metro board-owned chain link and 2-by-4 fence with a more attractive one of cedar split rail.

The clothesline prohibition I flouted by installing a removable carousel contraption, figuring by the time the taste police arrived, it could be safely stowed away. Compost bins were camouflaged as raised vegetable beds planted with actual vegetables during the growing season.

For the first few years, Randy and I concentrated on transforming our backyard into gardens. The trouble didn't start until we got around to the front yard. Our neighborhood covenants did not, as many still do, require a certain percentage of lawn, instead requiring "a landscape." I suspect that when our home was built in 1980, the notion that anyone would forgo lawn was unthinkable.

Soon after we laid flagstone on our front lawn, a complaint was registered with the covenant control committee. The entire committee assembled en masse on the sidewalk in front of my home and generously determined that what they were seeing did qualify as landscape. Thus did I receive an official variance for my lawnless front yard.

All was well for nearly two decades. In the meantime, new covenants were passed, this time with no mention of clotheslines or compost.

It was in March of last year that I discovered a city of Centennial code enforcement officer studying and photographing my front yard. He informed me that a complaint, anonymous naturally, had been filed against me for growing weeds. I told this young man (who, by the way, was wearing a flak vest!) that I could produce a receipt for every "weed" in my garden. When I dragged out photos to show him what our garden looked like when it wasn't still winter, he said he'd let the matter drop.

It seems not everyone loves a garden. I wish I'd had the presence of mind of a friend who works at Denver Botanic Gardens. When faced with a similar complaint, he offered to teach a class on wildflower gardening to his city's code-enforcement team.

No matter: I'm just proud to live in an enlightened community where, for a change, a garden is valued as much as a perfectly manicured lawn.