Man and His Garden Sow Seeds of Anger
Let’s take a trip down a stretch of Daphne Avenue in Gardena, a middle-class suburb lined with middle-class homes. Look at the neatly trimmed lawns at house after house after house. Wait. Off to the left. Something’s wrong here.
The front yard is wild with vegetation.
As residents of Daphne push lawn mowers back and forth to create their images of the perfect front yard, the vegetation at James Skeie’s place continues to grow. And GROW. AND GROW.
Rising along with the wildflowers, herbs, shrubs, trees and vines is his neighbors’ ire.
What he regards as a garden, they see as an unsightly assortment of jungle-like weeds that detract from the neat appearance of every other home on the block.
And in what has become a grass-roots battle over what is acceptable for the front yard of a home, residents of the block are pressing the city to crack down on the Skeies’ overgrown greenery. The battle has provoked a spirited debate in many of the street’s one-story homes about how much freedom a property owner ought to have.
“I see Cambodia when I look across the street,” said Catherine Nau-Ortiz, who has collected 30 signatures on a petition asking the city to order the yard cleaned up. “I call it the jungle house.”
Nau-Ortiz, a supervisor at a dental supply company, says her neighbor’s yard is the reason she has not been able to sell her home in a year, despite dropping the price $20,000. Prospective buyers, she said, focus more attention on his property than hers.
For next-door neighbor Tibor Denes, a cabinetmaker who has lived in his house for 25 years, Skeie’s yard brings with it health problems.
“It draws rats,” he said. “ . . . If someone chooses to live like this, perhaps he doesn’t belong here. People like this live in the mountains. This is a city.”
Skeie, 56, is a tall man with a well-trimmed white beard who has lived at the home for about five years. He has had run-ins with neighbors and officials in the past over this and other conditions on his property, but the yard has always been found within the law.
“I rather despise taking care of a lawn like Joe Blow,” he said during a recent tour of the property that included an occasional chomp on an herb or two. “Yes, it’s a little chaotic, but it’s naturalistic; it’s romantic and it has a lot of color.”
He sees the yard as an experimental nature preserve, a botany lab for his 8-year-old daughter, as well as a fruit and vegetable garden. There are dozens of different plants on the small plot, including peppermint, strawberries, a plum tree, a dwarf elm.
Skeie acknowledged that there had been a rat problem at the property, but rat poison has brought it under control. He agreed that the growth “lacks definition and boundaries and needs some trimming.” He even admitted that his plants are probably better suited for the country. But the problem, he said, is a lack of understanding by his neighbors.
“I’m very anti-Establishment,” said the self-described preacher, teacher, collector and real estate agent who now spends much of his time in the garden. “I don’t want to be offensive to people, but I don’t want to be pushed around.”
Some of Skeie’s neighbors have become his unlikely allies.
“My aesthetics are different from his aesthetics,” said Wayne Verrell, an insurance claims adjuster. But Verrell did not sign the petition, saying his neighbors are too eager to press their values on another. “I’ve learned to live with it. I personally think it looks like a weed garden and needs to be cleaned up, but to each his own.”
Robert Baxter, an engineer who lives around the corner from Skeie, pondered the matter long and hard before finally deciding to add his name to the list of the disgruntled.
“I feel that anyone who owns a home should be able to do with it what they want,” he said. “But in his case, I think he’s taken that to an extreme. . . . I’m thinking, ‘Gee, Jim, if you could just trim it a bit.’ ”
Nau-Ortiz and several neighbors have complained to city, fire and health officials about the property for several years. Along with the lawn, they are fed up with piles of collectibles around the home and an inoperable car in the driveway.
The city prosecuted Skeie in 1988 for storing combustibles and keeping more than three rabbits--Skeie had a dozen. Skeie pleaded no contest, was placed on a year of probation and agreed to keep his property up to code.
“What happens is we go out and find violations in those areas we have control, cite him, and he cleans it up just enough to meet code,” City Manager Ken Landau said.
Another problem has been that there is no city ordinance that specifically bans an overgrown yard. Gardena has laws that address fire hazards, health and safety violations, vehicles parked on lawns and even overgrown weeds, but city officials say the yard does not violate any of those codes.
In an appearance before the City Council last month, Nau-Ortiz called on the city to pass a property maintenance ordinance that would prevent property from becoming a “public nuisance” through inadequate maintenance.
Such an ordinance has been proposed in Gardena in the past but has never won city approval because council members are worried it might infringe on property owners’ rights.
Councilman James Cragin--who likened Skeie’s yard to “a refuse dump that someone has planted flowers in”--has asked the city attorney to bring the ordinance back to the council this summer.
All the clamoring has prodded Skeie to take a second look at his garden.
He talks about trying to make peace with the neighborhood by trimming back some of the growth here and there. But he doesn’t plan to go too far. He vows that his yard will never take on the “golf course look” of all the others on the block.
