Gardening at the Edge
Living on the edge is one of those claims that I enjoy making about my lifestyle. I have always liked the unorthodox life history that I have led and while the first seventeen years of my life I must attribute it to my mother and her wanderlust and adventurous lifestyle, I took only an educational breather for five years (BA and MBA) before reinventing my own personal version of that life on the edge. I would say that while I spent thirteen years living a suburban homelife in Rockville Centre on Long Island, my edginess found its outlet in my worklife moving around the professional finance landscape and then the global landscape. While most of my peers and I had started as early as 1979 traveling overseas to globalize our banking franchise into the multinational community, I went above a beyond in 1983 by setting up a global network of futures and options companies (Chicago, New York, London, Singapore and Paris) and then it got really crazy. Starting in 1985 (a mere nine years into my career), I took responsibility to all the banks’ business in the Emerging Markets including all of Latin America, Africa, Eastern Europe (pre-Glasnost…with the Berlin Wall still in tact) the Middle East (technically everything from the Levant to the Maghreb and the Persian Gulf…down through Pakistan at least) and Southeast Asia (pretty much everything other than Singapore and Australia). That all provided me lots and lots of living on the edge to satisfy whatever Jones I might have had for such quirkiness.
After a stint in Canada during which I covered all the northern edginess that existed in a separatist Quebec (setting up a Montreal Office), the midwestern areas of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta (far more wild and wholly than you might imagine and setting up a Calgary Office) and the woodsy regions of British Columbia, where a Vancouver Office was de rigueur, there was even more edginess to be found. The wilds of the processing world of defined benefit and defined contribution pensions was pretty out there, but the global Private Banking world was really on the edge. While I never was asked to carry suitcases of expatriating money out of any economic hotspots, I do remember a canoe ride up a Malaysian creek to a village where an unexpected $50 million customer resided and more than a few days spent in Saudi and Gulf area maglis waiting my turn for an audience with a sheikh or two. So, my life on the edge continued into the new millennium.
In the last twenty years my adventures have continued to have some geographical diversity, working for an Israeli company and traveling to several continents, but the edginess probably came more by being in the venture space where the wild and woolliness comes from the variety of people from 20 to 80 years of age that one finds oneself dealing. In those years I had to send a 23-year-old to jail for fraud and embezzlement, I had an 80-year old move his company in the dead of night so we could not find him (though we did since he only moved 1/2 mile away), I went to work for perhaps the most aggressive and rough investment bank in New York, I worked for a transnational billionaire that is now on the U.S. OFAC no-fly list, I worked with real estate developers all across New York and the U.S. (a group I have said and would say are the biggest gunslingers in the business world and included none other than Donald and Ivanka Trump and Jarred Kushner), and I spent six years trying to build the edgiest of the edgy projects called the New York Wheel and succeeded in financing it at $510 million and then $640 million.
One would think that edginess has to end at some point short of the final bell, but not so yet for me. I am doing three things at this time. I am still CEO of that little scientific R&D company trying to break into the hydrogen and ammonia synthesis world, I am teaching finance at the graduate level, dredging up all my past foibles as part of the case studies, and I am putting my experience to work as an expert witness, opening myself up to whatever historical boo-boos might be fair game to an opposing litigator. I guess I must believe that edgy beats complacency and that I am not yet ready to stare into space in retirement. So, the edge is still at the tip of my toes.
I am, however, venturing more and more into the world of gardening as I look for outdoor activities that I can reasonably manage and that have some tangible sense of accomplishment. When I think of gardening in the traditional sense, I think of a rose or flower garden or perhaps a vegetable garden with tomatoes. The edgiest thing there might be the danger of rabbits or getting a torn in the thumb. But I have no interest in vegetables (either for gardening or just barely for eating) and roses have always seemed too genteel for my taste though I do admire them from a distance. My form of gardening, both due to local flora tendencies and due to my personal “trees and rocks” preferences sees me doing what seems to me to be a more severe form of gardening.
My first effort involved 100 mini succulent plants bought en masse at a local succulent nursery and planted among the leaves of the patio hillock. My guess is that less than one third of those little baby succulents, all cute and neat in their little brown plastic Dixie cups, have survived the summer heat or the summer watering schedule (I still don’t know which is more deadly for succulents). That was a rather feeble first effort of improving the patio area look and feel. I next moved to the new Cecil Garden project on the South side of the house. This was a far more ambitious project turning an old garbage dump area and work-a-day citrus grove into a pleasant garden with stepping stones and pea gravel wending its way through citrus trees, vine-covered trellises, flowering planters, a new fountain and a natural boulder and rock garden with ten strategically-positioned bonsai trees. I feel very proud of that garden and all the unique aspects I put into it, including the magnificent Otomi wall mural done by my nephew, Jason. While I am not sure one would necessarily call my new garden as edgy, it seems on the distant edge of mainstream in many ways, since wall art of that scale and the planting of a large Irish Strawberry tree in such a hard-to-reach spot is certainly not ordinary.
I then went on to install a massive shadesail that may not seem like gardening, but really is. This “Cayenne Red” sail that measures over 900 square feet runs mostly over the red-tinged driveway parking area, but also goes up into the rock garden that frames the front of the house. We “planted” a seven-foot high, eight-inch diameter, 3/8-inch gauge steel pole that I chose to have painted in what was called “Illusive Green” so that it matched the surrounding succulents and boulders on the hillside to blend (in a green/grey way) as much as possible with the hillside. This may have been the best project I have undertaken yet on this property this year.
The next project had me wandering down to the front part of the property, putting in a walking garden bridge and path, cut through the succulents and planting whole new water-tolerant plantings and Pygmy Palms around our new games area. This was suddenly out on the edge of gardening. Now that that is completed, I am eyeing the patio area again, wondering what I can do out on that edge to make the patio, which is our main COVID-friendly dining area, more zoomy. I have my horticulturalist making a design suggestion and I already know that there will be some replacing of retaining wall bricks with natural stone. So, here I go again, setting out to do some gardening on the edge.