Garden Grows but Gardener Goes
Richard Dumke, 56, has slept in his battered white van for 15 years, parked permanently near a lush, green garden he has grown in a quiet corner of the Anaheim Hills Village shopping center.
But on Monday, the tow truck came at 4 p.m. and took away his ancient Ford, just as it began to rain.
“Well, I guess this is commencement time,” Dumke said, grabbing some bedding from the van he shared with his little dog, Pokey.
“It’s like I don’t quite believe it,” Dumke said. “It’s kind of inhumane if you ask me.”
Dumke, however, rolled with the punches. Losing the van was hard, but he still has the garden. He can’t imagine anyone wanting to destroy his beautiful garden. Tucked tightly in the southwest corner of the shopping center, it is a hidden paradise, dense with palms and pines, ficus and ferns--about every variety of plant you can think of.
His friends--and he has many--are outraged. They have all grown fond of the husky, mustachioed man, and worry that he won’t have a place to sleep. Far from wanting a vagrant removed, shop owners and area residents alike say if anything, he should be rewarded for having created a sanctuary not just for himself, but for them.
“The thing is, he’s built something beautiful,” said Julie Lambert, a retired teacher who met Dumke 15 years ago during her daily walk along the Santa Ana river channel. Last week, she and others were stunned to see a notice on his truck saying he would have to move by Monday. “So he’s homeless--so what? He’s not a nuisance. He doesn’t dump anything. He comes out and cleans all the weeds. I mean, this was a mess before. It was ugly. Now look at it.”
“He’s a good man,” said Mory Ghasemi, who owns Urban Cleaners in the mall and has known Dumke since he first motored into the lot.
“He’s not hurting anybody. . . . It’s very sad.”
Friends Say He Deserves Better
But a subcontractor hired by the mall’s management company said they had no choice.
“The new owners asked that the van be removed,” said Kathleen Packer, an official at Rue Vac Property Services in Orange, a company contracted by the property manager, DWA Smith and Co., of Newport Beach, to patrol the mall. “He was notified by the property manager that . . . if he was not gone by [Monday], that we would notify the towing company.”
Neither the property manager nor the new owner could be reached for comment.
Dumke said the last time he could get the van started was two to three years ago, so there was nothing he could do.
He may not be able to sleep in the parking lot anymore, but he has no intention of abandoning his garden. He alludes to a “backup plan”--a tiny shack he built that is hidden and, he hopes, hard to find.
It’s easy to understand why he and others feel Dumke has created a magical place. Wherever the eye falls, there are exotic plants, deciduous plants, drought-resistant plants. Plants that produce big flowers, plants that produce tiny flowers and plants that produce no flowers at all. He’s got a lemon tree, a grapefruit tree, two orange trees and two avocado trees.
He raved about the fruit of his fig tree.
“Oh, it was delicious--yum, yum,” Dumke said with a smile that shows more tongue than teeth. “There’s nothing like the fruit that you grow yourself.”
He’s filled the garden with little treasures--other people’s junk. A battered angel hangs over one archway. A sign that says “LOVE” hangs in another. Small ceramic animal figures--all chipped and fractured--dot the landscape.
A narrow dirt path, nearly strangled by thick ground greens, leads to a monument he built to memorialize his favorite dog, Angie, who died almost three years ago. Angie’s shrine overlooks a little pond he made out of rocks--20 shopping carts worth--that he collected from the riverbed.
His current project: a gated entry fashioned from a decorative bed frame that someone threw out. It will lead visitors into another section of the garden, where he’s already begun preparing the land for planting.
Packer, of Rue Vac Property Services, said she didn’t know if the new owners were aware of the garden, or whether they will want to rip it out. It’s unclear exactly how much of the land on which the garden thrives is owned by the mall, and how much is flood plain owned by the county. And Dumke’s glad for the confusion--it may save the garden.
Content Apart From the Rat Race
Dumke said he had already been living the vagabond life for five years when he started planting his garden. He said he tired of the rat race and chose instead a life that requires him to answer only to himself--and his dog.
He gets by on the money he makes from recycling aluminum cans, and from a few hours a week of work for the maintenance company that cleans the Imperial Promenade, a mall across the street from Anaheim Hills Village.
“I saw him looking through trash cans, and I hired him to help keep things clean,” said Pedro Gonzales, who owns Beneficial Maintenance Services. “. . . I couldn’t believe what he created.”
Dumke knows what it takes to make a garden grow, and he knows his plants. He can rattle off the scientific names of nearly all the garden’s 500 varieties.
He toils in the garden all day, nursing the dying plants he finds in trash cans back to health, and finding just the right spot for the new ones given to him by friends from the mall, and joggers who pass by his oasis every day.
Dumke has even captivated the heart of an outreach worker from the Mental Health Assn. of Orange County, Luis Montes, who said he has been checking on Dumke every few weeks for the last six months. Dumke’s happy and not harming anyone, Montes said. The property owners, he said, should let Dumke stay.
“It’s kind of sad, the situation,” Gonzales said. “I don’t even think he’s giving the center a bad image. If anything, he’s giving it a good image. That corner would be empty without [the garden].”
