05/05/2026
The Gardener and the Hermit :
Here is a photographic memory from 2 years ago showing my neighbour Eddie who is the local gardner chatting on the footpath to another neighbour, who seemed to be a friend.
As you can see, Eddie developed his own theory for counterpoint using trees or bushes as a support for his ladder by calculating the density and mass of the tree against his own body mass index while taking into account the appropriate considerations relative to elevation and to gravity. So that he can trim the top of surrounding trees and hedges that come under his radar of detection. He's a horticultural physicist and his ladder is the tool of application.
Sometimes he will also walk three dogs that he minds for his daughter. That takes considerable coordination. They stay in the garage and on the grounds of his home. He works all day doing gardening around the neighbourhood and then walks them on a single lead connected to three other leads and walks them on the footpath. It has the optical illusion of someone walking an undulating octopus consisting of three dogs all moving at once. They walk Eddie around the neighbourhood in this unusual coordination of K9 activity once or twice a day. If you think about it, trimming branches and bushes on a ladder supported by the boughs of a tree or bushes of a hedge is probably a undertaking of less risk and complexity than the walking of the three dogs.
Eddie is my favourite neighbour in Garden Grove. His friend in the picture was telling a long story about convincing a lady who lived next door, another neighbour I don't think I have ever seen, after many long years perhaps, to sell him a very fine car for not a lot of money. This was apparently the cause for sufficient excitement or significant advantage to go and tell Eddie. Who is still giving various spots in and around the streets and homes his special attention. Gardening, pruning, trimming and lawnmowing, etcetera.
He tends to anywhere or anything that takes his interest if it looks like no one is getting around to it or objects and insists they will do it themselves. His wanderings and areas of attention are prioritised by a learned pattern of what he can see that needs doing and whether it is safe for him to do so in those spaces based on the history of access and varying tolerance levels or appreciation for his efforts - or not - by those concerned. Also his own history of helping and how he feels about the residents he decides to help or not. For instance he hasn't been mowing the front yard of the Hermit whose Berlin Wall block of wild, untamed grasses bring to mind the wilds of Africa. Not for some months now and the moat of yellow grass continues to distance the brick fort from the encroachment of the concrete and bitumen footpath in increasing increments.
The Hermit and I don't know each other. But Eddie has stopped doing his grass. The Hermit lets it continue to grow and we in the surrounding streets wonder who will break first. Will the grass continue to grow or will Eddie give in and cut it ? Apparently it's of no consequence to the hermit, for whose mode I can identify, but I also don't want Eddie to go insane trying not to cut it. He has an informed impression of the residents whose homes he tends to. And apparently the Hermit's grass just isn't worth doing for the Hermit. Presumably the Hermit doesn't care to interact with anyone on the issue. He's content in the freedom and stability that hermetic inclinations offer to him and are presumably satisfied by. He's an introvert. Eddie is more of an extrovert and got to be outside doing something in the outside world. So, the Gardener has rejected or been rejected by the Hermit.
Possibly because I am younger than the hermit and generally polite and appreciative for his help, I don't yet qualify for abandonment on the issue of landscape maintenance in the eyes of Eddie. I've got a raft of health complications and no shed or any tools for home maintenance so Eddie is a valued friend.
Eddie's friend in the picture was telling him a long story about coercing a lady who lived next door to sell him a very fine automobile for not a lot of money, like I say. Seemingly over a long course of time and just had to tell him about it. I happened to see them after getting off the bus and the perilous proposition of the ladder against the tree just had to be documented at the time. Eventually, it became one of my favourite images. Unsurprisingly, there are no images of the Hermit. I've only ever seen him as a silhouette or shadowy figure behind the wheel of his car coming and going by the driveway at his self imposed exile, the borderland to his private universe. The solid yellow grass walls around his home are freakishly reminiscent in their association to the Wizard of Oz in my imagination.
