Pruning Brings Plants Into Animal Kingdom
Not a day goes by that somebody doesn’t pull over and stop in front of Esequiel Ruvalcaba’s house.
Sometimes the people park and sit. Sometimes they get out and knock on the front door to ask whether they can take pictures.
A carload of six from Miami stopped recently and asked if they could hang out in Ruvalcaba’s front yard, just to look. They left three hours later, after much picture-taking and group portraits in various corners of the yard.
But the most activity comes from people who never quite stop. Most simply slow down--it’s a reflex, a natural response in the face of seeing what Ruvalcaba hath wrought before his otherwise plain house on Seaward Avenue just north of Thompson Boulevard. One woman was so transfixed that her car rolled across the yellow line, narrowly missing oncoming cars. Ruvalcaba’s screams helped her snap out of it.
“People just enjoy this,” says Ruvalcaba, gesturing to his fecund menagerie of 12 huge animals carved from the foliage of mature eugenia trees.
There is the brontosaurus, a good six feet across and floating six feet off the ground. It adjoins an species-unspecific animal with a wide, purse-lipped mouth, whose lower jaw blows in the breeze at a faster rate than the head, leaving the impression that mastication is taking place.
“That’s why we call him ‘Big Mouth,’ ” Ruvalcaba says.
Big Mouth and the dinosaur are joined, in no particular order, by a large bull, a camel, a savage-looking bird, a pair of ducks (heading out over the driveway toward traffic), a monkey (with arms held toward the sky), an eagle, a two-headed monster of a bird and a peacock.
Together, these creatures form an installation that hangs in suspension above the property, as though the lawn were the base of some psychedelic aquarium. Things don’t usually look this way in this neighborhood of tiny, trim yards on Seaward Avenue. But then Ruvalcaba’s no ordinary Venturan.
He grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico, moved to Ventura in 1950, soon to become the chef at Loop’s on Main Street, where he’d remain for 20 years. He then signed on to a deep-sea drilling rig, cooking beef stews around the world and visiting 78 countries. It was a gig lasting 14 years.
Then Esequiel Ruvalcaba decided: enough. He’d start his own business. He was well on the way to paying off his Seaward home, which he’d moved into in 1961, and it just seemed time to go to work for himself. So he started Zeke’s Gardening Service.
Zeke as in Esequiel.
“Call me Zeke,” he insists. “Everybody calls me Zeke. In fact, nobody really can say my first name. I like Zeke.”
Zeke is 60, distinguished-looking in white shirt and pin-stripe pants and silver, brushed-back hair. He also is hard as nails. Save treatment for a three-inch cut on his forearm years ago, he’s never been to a doctor, which he says would bring bad luck.
One of the first things Zeke did as a businessman was to cut his hours back to a four-day week.
That, he says, gave him time to “explore” his trees. One thing Zeke missed about Guadalajara were the trees in public parks. Many of those trees were sculpted into animals, people, living things.
He sought to re-create them in his yard. But Zeke never wanted to force anything. In fact, he abhors the use by some tree sculptors of internal wiring to support their forms.
“That’s not the way,” Zeke says. “You move through the tree, follow its branches. You see what is possible. The branches tell you. I don’t know what I’m doing when I start out. The monkey was, I thought, going to be a bear.”
The evolution of the form--that is, the time it takes for Zeke to discover through intermittent pruning that a tree will become a camel or a duck or, if the branches just plain fail the animal kingdom as we know it, a two-headed bird--averages two years.
Mention the word artist and Zeke looks perplexed. He tells you that he never attended school. With some foot-shuffling, he laughs and allows that the forms he creates sometimes even surprise him.
“I can’t sit still,” he says. “I never watch TV. Sometimes, I’ll cook for my wife. But mainly I do this, with the trees. It keeps me going.”
With that, a car pulls to the shoulder of Seaward, just short of the madly chewing Big Mouth. Inside, the driver commences a surreal journey that only a man named Zeke Ruvalcaba could have charted.
