I have this recurring nightmare. I wake up one morning and look out my window, or open the front door and, instead of the garden, there is an empty swathe of cement. Sometimes, there is a bulldozer plowing up the last tree, or a chainsaw gang working on the shrubbery.
I had this dream once when I was living in an apartment that was part of a complex of old brownshingles--a former family compound. The garden included a mature Tasmanian tree fern and a huge old evergreen magnolia. There was also an old purple-leaf plum that turned into a fragrant cloud of pale pink every spring.
On this morning many years ago I woke up from the nightmare in which the entire front garden had been dug up and cemented over. When I returned home from work that day, the better part of the plum tree--in full bloom--was lying across my doorstep. The chainsaw gang had left it there to be chopped into pieces the next day.
Maybe I became sensitized in childhood to the vision of blooming orchards going under the bulldozer and old farmhouses succumbing to the wrecking ball. As a kid I watched hundreds of acres of apricot and plum trees become skeletal wood frames and then treeless suburbs, each with identical front lawns and cement driveways. And out on my bicycle jaunts--past the business strips and city streets to the country roads, hidden creeks, oak groves and undulating fields of wild oats and mustard--I watched as, year by year, the roads got widened, the creeks were culverted, and the oaks and fields became parking lots, business "parks" and suburban estate homes.
These days, when I visit my parents in the town where I grew up, the suburb that I witnessed being created from farmland is itself being bulldozed to create a newer suburb. But this transformation is happening house by house instead of acre by acre. Now, the old single-story house is razed, the almost-50-year-old trees removed, and an imposing castle-like mansion replaces it, complete with instant landscaping.
When I left home to go to college I remember thinking that I would never have to go back to that suburb where my childhood paradise lay buried under asphalt and shopping malls. In the city where I came to live, the farmland was long gone and surprisingly jubilant gardens and old trees melded with the rows of close-packed houses. Here, it seemed, the landscape was safe from mass transformation.
But I was wrong. And in the years I have lived in this alternately charming and aggravating city I have witnessed both mass destruction and incremental loss of old landscapes. Over ten years ago an apocalyptic fire destroyed hundreds of acres of the city, burning over two thousand houses, killing fifty people, and obliterating oak and eucalyptus groves, willows, laurels, creekside plants, and countless gardens.
Today, the neighborhoods of the fire are a wood-frame Manhattan of sky-scraping mansions bulged out to their property lines. From the flatlands the view of the hills is a solid line of rooflines and multi-story picture windows elbowing each other for the same view.
And now, down in the flatlands, a firestorm of real estate speculation is fueling an incremental transformation. Much of it is an improvement for dilapidated neighborhoods and a boon for city coffers. Although most city dwellers are not able to afford to buy. And many of the young couples planning families have left to look for cheap housing in the inland valleys where the last of the farmland is being bulldozed for more suburbs.
On my street the genteel remnant of a turn-of-the-century real estate boom is itself becoming the victim of the latest hot market. The house may stay, it's white clapboard and columed front portico set back from the street behind a picket fence. But it's generous lot and gardens, neglected for decades but awash in the dappled shade of its grand trees--redwood, cedar, live oak, acacia is likely to become a swathe of cement and plywood.
Yesterday, the inevitable notice from the City arrived in the mail. The "revised" notice that the neighbor intends to remove "Eight (8) Trees" in addition to trees within ten feet of proposed construction that "may require removal".
And last night, my nightmare came back.
Posted by briggs at August 5, 2005 9:50 AM