So the City of Fresno finally caught up with me.

Apparently my “landscaping” had gotten a bit out of control lately. Unbeknownst to me, after living here for over thirty years, my front porch had become “so overgrown or uncontrolled as to create a fire/health/safety hazard”. Regular maintenance would be required to prevent recurrence.

The first thing I did after reading my “code violation” letter was take some pictures of my overgrown and hazardous landscaping.

Well, okay, I get it. Kind of. Unless you looked down at the mosaic on the step, my house number was no longer visible. I guess for safety purposes, first responders should be able to see that. And some of the camelia branches were touching the eaves.

But it’s star jasmine season, and the star jasmine always get this way in May. Then, when the blooms are starting to dry up, my gardeners, (who have come like clockwork every two weeks for the past twenty years), will trim them back. I love my star jasmine, partly for the scent, and partly because I like the way they look.

I even used them as a backdrop for Belle’s fashion show in May of 2018.

There wasn’t always star jasmine here, but it was one of the first things I planted when I came to live here after Mark and I got married in 1992.

At first I just had one plant, and it was in a pot on the front porch. That’s Cody, my first Sheltie, looking out from the corner of the screen door. He hasn’t been featured in any of my “Pets from the Past” posts yet, but he needs to be.

Eventually I planted it in the actual dirt and got one for the other side.

Here you can see how they looked when they were kind of a medium size. The wooden garage door and the Winnie the Pooh banner date this photo back to about 1993-94. Is it just me, or do the bushes look about the same now as they did back then?

The camelia bushes have always been there, and in this “photo-of-a-photo”, you can also see the birdbath, which later became the whimsical mushroom, which later got stolen out of the front yard.

Eventually the star jasmine became huge. I’m going to guess by the outfit I had on, that this is from some time after 1998.

This is the camelia bush in March of 2023, with the rosemary bush in front of it. The gardeners have taken the initiative to keep the rosemary trimmed neatly into a ball. If you look, you can see that the star jasmine hadn’t started blooming yet, and they were nicely manicured.

I admit, sometimes the mailbox almost gets covered up by the camelias.

Since the weather was really nice the day after I got my code enforcement notice in the mail, and I had energy, I decided to start working on the bushes. The gardeners weren’t due for another week, and I didn’t think I should expect them to trim the camelias, although I already knew they would do the star jasmine.

Gradually I began to make progress.

You’ll notice that with the camelia trimmed back, the rosemary isn’t really a completely round ball.

At one point I even had to borrow my neighbor’s green waste bin for all the trimmings!

Continuing to make progress.

A lot of the greenery on the jasmine was actually covering up a bunch of dry branches. I don’t know if that’s just how they always are, or if I’m not doing something right, like maybe I should be trimming them back more often? I guess I should look that up one of these days.

This is how it looked when I finished.

True to form, the gardeners came the following Monday and finished the job, as you can see on my front porch camera. I wondered if they thought it was odd that I would have trimmed the bushes myself. I didn’t want to go out there and explain, and they didn’t ask.

While I was trimming the bushes, I took the opportunity to pull out some of the ivy in the flower bed under the camelia. There is really a lot left to do, because that ivy has been a home to frogs, snails, and at one time even the neighbor’s pet turtle! You’ll notice I didn’t mention rats. I know about rats and ivy, having been the “pest control guy’s wife” for 24 years. I just chose not to mention them. If there are any (which I doubt) I will deal with them later. But until then, do you think I will be putting my gardening tools away any time soon?

Umm, that would be a “no”.