An Aging Buffalo
I know I should call it a bison and I know that a buffalo is something mostly found in Africa and India and not on the Great Plains of America, but everyone calls it a buffalo, so I often fall back into calling my Bison Boulder a buffalo. The beast is now seventeen months old and has been seen by 90% of the people who I expect will see it, but I see no sense in letting it fade into the landscape. This week I have been tackling some maintenance tasks on the back hillside. I’ve spent so much time adding to the hillside that I have somewhat neglected getting into a regular maintenance regime. I have decided that its important for me to do that because I invested so much time in doing all the back hillside projects that it would be a shame to let things slide into disrepair.
While I worry less about the plantings since Joventino does come by every three weeks and will do whatever I direct him to do. For instance, when he comes next week I plan to ask that he do four things plus whatever else he feels needs doing (which is usually regular gardening maintenance). I have a pile of green waste matter I want him to dispose of down the cliff at the bottom of the hillside (I was too lazy to drag all my prunings down all the way), I want him to remove some of the Sweet Alyssum flowers that have gone leggy and tangled in some of the beds, while leaving it alone in the wildflower gardens, I want him to freshen up the mulch in those same beds (I will buy mulch before he comes), and I want him to prune back the two large Senita Cacti on the front hillside. The Senita are doing well, but the abundance of arms has caused some of them to lodge and they need to be trimmed off to keep the cactus looking vibrant.
I did a lot of hillside maintenance this week as it turns out. In addition to my normal hand watering, which is my way of inspecting everything, my focus was on trimming back a lot of native water-tolerant shrubbery I’ve planted around the hillside. Those are a combination of pointleaf manzanitas, blue blossoms and chaparral sage, all of which have grown too nicely. I cut all the bushes back fairly aggressively on the theory that they will grow back even fuller and less leggy looking. My sister asked if was the right time of year to do that and I just shrugged. My gardening is on a “live and learn” arrangement and I figure that these plants are all confused by the temperate climate and lack of definable seasons out here for the most part anyway. While doing that pruning, I also started removing the Sweet Alyssum flower mats from around them. I call them mats because these lovely little white flowers grow like a sisal door mat and can be lifted in a convenient clump. I pulled out four large bucketfuls of them and that is a large part of the green matter dump I have accumulated and which Joventino will dispose of. I left some of the Sweet alyssum for Joventino to pull out himself so that I can explain to him where I want to let it grow wild and where I want it removed going forward. Basically, I am defining my spaces in the garden and separating them with stones and such.
I also decided that the purple prairie grass that is planted all around the buffalo needed another haircut. I figure grasses do just fine with cutting whenever it suits me and I like the area around the buffalo to look tidy. While doing that I also decided that the buffalo low voltage lights (there are five of them) needed to be adjusted. I had already put one up on a brass riser and I had four more risers laying down there for when I felt ambitious enough to retire the whole mess. I went about burying some of the exposed low voltage cable and put one more light on a riser, but left the other three at ground level to see how it looked. I think I might have the right blend of low and high lamps and can always add to the riser collection whenever I have the ambition. I have gotten pretty confident with low voltage landscape lighting, so it was no problem to do all that. While doing it I ws close enough to the buffalo to notice that the seventeen months has brought some wear and tear to my big bovine friend.
Kim calls the buffalo Betty and she has spent the seventeen months building up a nice patina on her metalwork. She has rusted to a rich chocolate brown and the highlights I put on her nose, eyes, horns and hooves have held up well. They were the right aesthetic touch, but the steel ws meant to rust and it has started to rust through the paint I had applied last year. The brown nose was the least noticeable, but the horns were starting to show enough rust spots that a touch-up was very much in order. I also noticed that the pelt, which is made of outdoor shag carpeting had taken a beating in the full sun and had faded back more to its original mink coloring than the brown I had tried to make it.
So, I went off to Home Depot and Lowe’s and loaded up on more brown and ivory spray paint. The paint is not so expensive, but those stores keep it under lock and key as though it were gold, presumably to deter the graffiti artists in the community. Whenever I buy some I need a sales assistant to come to the self-check-out counter to authorize the purchase. I must not look enough like a hoodlum to concern them since they rarely stop and question me about my intentions. I had no problem finding ivory paint in sufficient supply, but brown is a whole other issue. There are many varieties of brown. There is espresso, dark brown, chestnut brown, walnut brown and various other shades of brown. I might have to write a book called Fifty Shades of Brown, but I’m afraid it might attract the wrong kind of audience. So, since there were only several cans of each hue of brown, I chose to mix it up and just bought all the shades.
This buffalo is a creature of my invention and I can define and redefine it pretty much as I choose. Right now I want to darken up the pelt, which is made of two raggedly cut 8X11 outdoor shag rugs. The material has held up well and there are only a few balding spots, but the sun does fade my paint, so I set about to give Betty a die job. She like all the women of a certain age has gone grey and needs a little coloration help. You don’t want it to look either too uniform or too brassy. Strangely enough, the combination of brown colors worked quite well in keeping the viewer guessing and not feeling that they are just being handed an artificial buffalo with painted hair. I crawled all over Betty, being careful not to fall through or collapse the built up hump I created last year (a combination of rock, wood and plastic planting buckets). It took perhaps eight cans of brown spray paint to finish the job, but as I look out over Betty’s back, I note that the pelt looks better when it is darkened like this. The blending of brown colors makes it all look very natural and mottled the way an older broad’s hair might look. The absence of perfection lends an added air of reality to the whole piece.
As I stare down the hillside from my deck perch I find myself thinking that we are all like the aging buffalo. We have many good years left in us even if we need an occasional dye job to stave off the ravages of the sun. Betty is a California gal and she looks as good as new for another year.