Turf War : Horticulture Artists and ‘Mow, Blow and Go’ Gardeners Compete for Work in Well-to-Do Areas
Harry Nakamura, a gardener for almost five decades, is old school. He works slowly, methodically. A spry 76, he knows how to prune trees in bonsai fashion.
Jose Torres is a “mow, blow and go” gardener, scurrying through yards as quickly as 60 minutes apiece, trimming the grass, clearing away fallen leaves and departing for the next house.
Though they have never met, Nakamura and Torres are locked in a fierce, symbolic battle over who will care for the bucolic gardens of Southern California’s well-to-do homeowners. The competition is so keen that it has helped transform professional gardening from a horticultural art into custodial maintenance--the era of McYard.
“Today, most gardeners don’t garden like they used to. It’s a janitor type of thing,” said Nakamura, who works for homeowners in Brentwood and Palisades. “You mow the lawn and clean up.”
The struggle to stake a claim to the choicest turf is an inevitable consequence of a California labor market in which the newest arrivals always claim the bottom-rung jobs, casting aside established immigrants. As a result, Latinos now dominate gardening, an occupation once the preserve of Japanese Americans.
Nowhere is the competition more ferocious than in tony neighborhoods such as Bel-Air or Beverly Hills, where trees are carved into huge lollipops. Most gardeners make close to minimum wage, but in those places the work can pay 30% more than for a similar home a few miles away. For gardeners scraping to survive, a job at an estate means pay dirt in a grim economy. It means being able to buy meat for dinner.
Reggie Diaz learned the stakes recently when the owner of a home where he had gardened for 27 years fired him, explaining: “Reggie, the guy across the street can do it for cheaper.”
Diaz looked at the guy across the street, the guy with the mower. By the man’s shabby clothing and downcast eyes, Diaz figured that he was a new arrival to the United States, and Diaz decided to go away quietly. These are the moments that eat into his business in Bel-Air, the Palisades and Beverly Hills; he estimates that his income, now about $24,000 a year, has dropped 30% in five years.
Gardening has always been the job of the new arrival or those denied other opportunities because of language ability or discrimination. When Japanese Americans were released from relocation camps after World War II, so many went into gardening that at one point 70% of Japanese American men in West Los Angeles were working in the trade, according to one study.
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Latino immigration has drastically changed that. In Los Angeles County, about 43,000 people, mostly men, work as gardeners or groundskeepers--and half lack U.S. citizenship. According to a study of 1990 census data, 75% were born in Mexico.
“Gardening is an important starting job,” said Deborah Cobb-Clark, a labor economist at Illinois State University. “It has the advantage of not involving a lot of contact with the public so you don’t have to speak English. It doesn’t require reading or writing, so lack of education won’t matter. (Immigration officials) are not out there checking identification of servants, so chances of getting caught are relatively low.”
With a steady flow of an estimated 125,000 illegal immigrants to California each year, many of whom stay in the southern part of the state, gardening opportunities have become scarce and the glut of cheap labor has caused salaries to drop.
“People are coming in large numbers and they are desperate for anything,” said Michael Dear, a USC professor of geography. “Gardening is not a perfect job, but it’s better than no job at all, and often it’s better than what they left behind. People don’t come for themselves. They come for their children.”
Jose Munoz did.
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Munoz, 54, cannot help beaming when he talks about his three children, who were born here and attended college here. His eldest daughter became a business administrator, his son a computer engineer and his youngest daughter a bank supervisor.
Born in Mexico, Munoz gardens for 14 clients in Bel-Air and Beverly Hills six days a week, 10 hours a day, with one helper, earning about $55,000 a year.
“I have been the luckiest person, the luckiest father, the happiest husband,” he said.
Yet he has struggled every step, since the days when he picked cotton in Texas and oranges and nectarines in the San Joaquin Valley.
A gardener for 28 years, he has honed his clientele, which once included the likes of Doris Day and Jack Lemmon. Today he no longer works for celebrities, who tended to complain about sounds from mowers in the mornings. It’s easier to work for those who are rich without the spotlight, he says.
He pampers his clients, walking silently, invisibly, respectfully in the yards of their estates. When his children were young he would never bring one along, even if he was certain the owner was away. He knows his clients’ aesthetics and tries to anticipate their wishes so they need not give him directions. One Bel-Air resident has phoned him only three times in almost three decades, including once to ask him to fix a broken pipe.
There are, of course, some queries he cannot oblige, such as the plight of the woman who hates the tracks that a mower leaves on freshly cut grass.
“She likes to see only a green carpet,” sighed Munoz. “I have to convince her it is impossible, not even if you used a helicopter. Nothing doesn’t leave a mark.”
So he takes great pains to mow in precise, straight lines with perpendicular swathes chiseled into the grass at exact 45-degree angles. And he makes sure that her 30-foot-tall ficus hedges are the pride of Bel-Air. It takes him 12 hours with his pruning shears to complete the hedges, a job that includes shaping coves for the Greek statues. It is so intricate a task that when Munoz cannot get to it, his client pays a trimming company that requires about 32 man-hours for the same work, using hand clippers to snip each sprig.
When Munoz finishes, the lady of the house teases him about his meticulousness, claiming in jest that the gardener is irked if the birds land on the bushes for fear that they will mar the razor-straight lines etched in the shrubbery.
Munoz understands the historical forces that led him and his compatriots to replace Japanese Americans as gardeners. “We chased them out,” he said. And he appreciates the fact that today, others want to take gardening away from him.
From dawn to dusk, he sees scores of threadbare Latino gardeners sweep through Bel-Air, roaming house to house, armed with business cards and weed whackers, desperate to stake their claim.
Some slip their phone numbers in the mailbox, hoping that a rich stranger will deign to call them back. The more brazen knock at doors, offering in heavily accented English to do the same work for less money than the current gardener.
Sometimes Munoz walks to the mailboxes after they have left and pockets their cards. He tries to be philosophical. “Everybody has the right to do what they can to survive,” he said. He does not take it personally. The competition is merely the unfolding of the American Dream: People arrive, struggle for a toehold, work their way up and out of a profession.
In that parade, Harry Nakamura is a rarity, one of the few Japanese Americans who remain.
Nakamura remembers when every house had a gardener of Japanese descent, when most trees were trimmed in bonsai fashion. In recent years, Nakamura learned Spanish so he could communicate with helpers and the other maintenance people he meets.
“You can count the Japanese gardeners on your hand now,” Nakamura said. “I didn’t get to go to college. You go to college, you are not going to do this kind of work. College graduates want to push the pencil and make money.
“I was born at the wrong time. Anybody born 20 years after I was, they had a better chance.”
In Southern California and across the nation, a division of labor has emerged. When homeowners want to plant, they consult a landscape architect--a task that gardeners such as Nakamura used to handle. When people want their trees trimmed, again, they hire an expert.
“Now, it’s all specialized,” Nakamura said. “It’s quite a change. It’s a lot more simple.”
It is simpler because motorized blowers have replaced hosing down the driveway, weed whackers have replaced hoeing and power mowers have replaced manual ones. Yet it remains backbreaking work that requires people to spend the day beneath the searing sun.
Nakamura, a farmer’s son, never figured on this life. As a young man born in San Francisco, he set his heart on becoming an electrician or a radio technician. But at 23, during World War II, he was dispatched to an internment camp. It turned out to be the only time he could practice the trade for which he went to school.
Released after three years, Nakamura could find no work in his profession. At his school, he was advised to try Hawaii, a spot where he would not be penalized for being Asian. Instead, he came to Los Angeles, believing it would be more lenient.
“I pounded the pavement,” said Nakamura, eating his lunch on the tailgate of his pickup parked at a Brentwood home. “I wound up a gardener.”
Because of today’s increased competition, gardeners who enter the business have even fewer opportunities for advancement than Nakamura’s generation, experts say.
“The Japanese gardeners could make decent living wages and their children could become properly educated,” said USC’s Dear. “That’s not going to happen with the current generation of gardeners. They are locked into an employment ghetto because jobs are not plentiful and there’s a large number of people waiting to take those jobs. It’s more hand-to-mouth now.”
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Few know this dynamic better than Jose Torres. A Mexican immigrant in his 30s, married and the father of three with few prospects, Torres began gardening this year when an acquaintance retired and gave him his mower and leaf blower. Torres does not earn enough to have a telephone at home, or to pay his friend who occasionally propels the unwieldy mower at one of the three homes that Torres maintains. Struggling to feed his children, he also works as a dinner cook in a Culver City restaurant, a job he much prefers to yardwork.
Pausing to watch his friend mow a yard in Brentwood, Torres shakes his head.
“I’m sorry I got into this,” he says.
Pedro Frias is not sorry. All he has to do is remember Mexico.
After laboring as a gardener for five years on USC’s grounds, Frias, 46, decided to launch his own business. He has worked on his own as a gardener for five years. Before turning to gardening, he was a night janitor, but he prefers daylight hours and being outside, even if he makes only $10,000 to $15,000 a year.
“I don’t care if it’s lowly work--it’s work,” he said.
Frias, who went only to the first grade in Mexico, has struggled all his life. His father died when he was an infant, leaving Frias’ mother to care for the couple’s seven children. She worked washing clothing by hand and planting corn in the fields. At age 5, Frias usually accompanied her. She would cook a handful of beans and ladle out watery soup to her hungry children.
Today, by dint of saving, Frias owns a small cottage in south Los Angeles. Working by himself, he tends four yards a day in communities including Sierra Madre and San Marino.
“I don’t care if I don’t have good clothes. I don’t care about eating beef,” Frias said. “I always have enough for food. I don’t need too much money.”
One time Frias was fixing a sprinkler when he slipped and fell, cutting open his forehead on a corner of a house. Blood poured down his face. When Frias arrived home, his wife saw the flap of skin hanging loosely on his forehead and insisted that he go to the hospital emergency room. He got 10 stitches, then went back to work. Like so many gardeners, he has taken an oath: His children will lead better lives.
That wish came true for Jose Flores, 69, still gardening in the neighborhoods of San Marino. “If you don’t want to work like me,” he would tell his three children, “you have to go to college.”
His boys all graduated from UCLA, the eldest becoming an engineer, the next a doctor and the third a computer technician.
“I am proud,” Flores says, beaming. “But I have no more helpers.”
