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| "Steve" in Over the Hedge |
Have you ever seen Dreamworks' Over the Hedge? If you haven't, the storyline is simple: Simple forest animals meet suburbia.Throw in a smooth-talking raccoon, a psychotic animal control keeper, and an uptight development owner, and you've got the basic ingredients.
In the movie, there's a particularly memorable scene when the animals meet their first sign of human civilization: a tall, green hedge that surrounds the housing that surrounded their home. Of course, the animals have never seen a big green leafy fence before, and thinking that it's alive, decide to call it "Steve" as in "Oh great and powerful Steve! What do you want from us?"
I am proud to say that I killed Steve this afternoon. Or actually, my parents did, with some help from me.
When my family recently moved into our new house, a giant juniper hedge, which we named Steve, greeted us in the front garden. He looked similar to the picture on the left: big, kind of furry looking. We quickly found out that Steve was anything but furry.
Steve didn't take kindly to our attempts to uproot him and attacked us fiercely with his many branches and ninja-like needles that slipped beneath our gloves and jeans to embed themselves in our skin. His many trunks' diameters were golf-ball sized, if not bigger; we figured that Steve happily sat in our front yard for 25 years.He resisted so strongly that Dad had to wrap rope around Steve and yank him out one bush at a time with the pickup truck, a process which required both street lanes in front of our house. Mom and I cut up branches and tossed them into the pick up truck. We also shook the dirt from the bush's roots and shoveled the dirt back into the garden.
Of course today was the day that everybody decided to drive down our street. Maybe a huge yard sale was going on around the corner. It must have been a good one for people to come by every five minutes. We saw more people trying to get around us today than we have in the last six weeks we've lived here. One person asked if we were the owners.
Dad replied, "No, we're stealing someone else's bush. They go for real cheap on the black market."
When we finally conquered Steve, it felt really good to toss the last discarded branch on top of the pickup bed. Dad, Mom, and I immediately collapsed on the front lawn, stared at the empty hole where Steve used to be and looked at the treasures we found beneath his branches: a wallet, a street lamp shell, and a crushed water bottle. Then we decided to have root-beer floats.
So what interesting gardening or landscaping stories do you have?
