Part 3 — What June Saw
Edith raised one white-gloved finger. “June kept a garden journal for forty years. She gave me the last volume the week before she passed.”
She opened a small green notebook. “March the ninth. Ten forty at night. Grant Vollmer in the side easement behind the Otts rose bed, pulling up the little orange survey stakes and setting them six feet farther into Harolds lot. He did it three nights in a row.”
“That is a diary,” Grant said.
“It is a dated record with photographs taped in,” I said. “June always kept her Polaroid on the kitchen windowsill.”
The room finally understood. Grant had planned a pool and a pergola for his own back lot, which ended where the roses began. Moving the stakes would give him a new strip of land. The only way to keep it was to get rid of the roses that proved the original line.
I had asked the county surveyor in April to re-shoot our lot lines. The recorded plat matched Ediths covenants and Junes journal to the inch. The hearing officer, a retired attorney sitting in the third row, read all three documents and nodded slowly.
The finding was short. Every planting that existed before 1990 is protected under the recorded covenants, so the fines were never valid. Altering a boundary marker is also a violation the county takes seriously, and Grant received a citation and was ordered to restore the stakes and pay for the survey.
The board met in the clubhouse that same night. They voided all $9,600 in fines and signed a written release of the lien. Grant resigned before a recall vote could be called. Kimberly came over and apologized to me for the things she had said to the neighbors.
A garden that is older than the rules cannot be fined out of existence by the people who arrived after it.
Edith pressed the green journal into my hands. On the last page, June had written that she hoped someday somebody would sit on the bench by the roses and simply enjoy them.
In April, the spring home tour made my yard its first stop. A sign by the gate read: The June Ott Rose Garden, planted 1984.
I sat on that bench in Junes favorite tie while sixty-two bushes bloomed in every color you can name. Cars slowed down on the street to look, just like they used to.
