Hmm, that is interesting. They changed the picture on the website. The one in 92 is still correct, but that was posted from a different server.
Here it is, right now. Subject to change, of course. Cound't find the original story.
Posted on 03/25/2003 11:35:19 AM PST by HairOfTheDog
Lisa Wright makes it a point to stop and smell the flowers every day. She never fails to hear birds singing. She seeks to be one with nature, and the place where she chooses to do so is her own front yard.
That apparently doesn't suit the Sundown Glen Community Association. The neighborhood group has nothing against flowers or birds or trees, but it isn't happy at all about Wright's front yard.
And because of that, she may be headed to jail.
"They claim my yard doesn't conform to subdivision rules and want me to cut it down," she said in a recent interview. "But there are no rules that I'm breaking, and no one that I'm bothering. It isn't right."
The community association is in Harris County Civil Court at Law No. 2 to get Wright to overhaul her self-described "natural habitat" front yard to bring it into line with the others in her small west Harris County subdivision.
The association isn't telling Wright what to plant, though. It isn't even telling her what not to plant. It mainly wants less of the native Katy Prairie vegetation that's already there.
"Ms. Wright entered into an agreed judgment, which the court approved, to cut back on the growth in her front yard and to keep it maintained," said Jane Janecek, attorney for the homeowners group.
Wright's efforts so far to cut back her yard were found inadequate by Judge Gary Block in a hearing last week. He ordered her to return to court at 9 a.m. Thursday to start a 24-hour jail sentence for contempt of his previous order that she heed terms of the 2002 mediated agreement, or so-called agreed judgment.
The slight, black-haired, 55-year-old defendant laughed nervously last week at the prospect of going to jail. But she said she remains dead serious about what she's doing and why.
"I've never been in a spot like this, and I don't like confrontation," she said. "But when I'm pushed up against a wall -- like this -- if I'm wronged, then I'll fight. I'm not hurting anyone with my yard."
Wright built her yard painstakingly over the past 10 years, starting from an almost bare-dirt yard with one broken Siberian elm sapling. Since then, she has cultivated a collection of red cedars, crepe myrtles and wood sorrel ground cover, along with an overcup oak, a Barbados cherry tree and a Mexican plum. Dozens of other plants, large and small, dot the yard.
The effect is a small-scale version of the Houston Arboretum or, as she notes pointedly, "the kind of yard you see in parts of River Oaks or in places along Memorial Drive in the villages (area)."
It's not, however, what you see elsewhere in Sundown Glen, an early 1980s subdivision comprising several square blocks of mid-priced homes located north of Katy Freeway west of Barker-Cypress Road. Most homes have ordinary grass lawns, a few ornamental shrubs and a shade tree or two.
Wright's yard stands apart, but not sufficiently to warrant jail time, argues her attorney, Helen Mayfield. This week, in order to keep Wright out of jail, Mayfield plans to file a motion to stop enforcement of the contempt sentence and also a request for a rehearing on the agreed judgment.
Wright admits her case would seem to be a run-of-the-mill dispute between a homeowner and a neighborhood association.
Throughout Harris County, such groups and their property managers play major roles in providing amenities such as playgrounds and swimming pools that aren't supplied by cities or the county.
They also enforce the deed restrictions that define permitted and prohibited land uses and set at least general standards for property maintenance. Deed restrictions are initiated by landowners and developers and, unless periodically renewed, usually expire in a specified period of years.
Deed restrictions serve purposes akin to zoning regulations in otherwise uncontrolled parts of Harris County. They are a never-ending source of homeowner association friction.
However, Wright's fight with her neighborhood association isn't the everyday variety for a couple of reasons:
For one thing, she is a landscaper, albeit currently unemployed. She claims to know more than most about what constitutes "natural habitat." The Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife awarded her a citation for her yard last spring.
"This isn't just overgrowth," she said. "I put it together by design and I knew what I was doing."
Secondly, Wright's case is a bit unusual in that she contends she didn't know exactly what that agreed judgment from last year ultimately would amount to.
"I had a stroke and was still recovering when I was in court being told to do this and that or go to jail," she recalled. "I had some very poor advice."
In fact, she recently hired Mayfield because she felt she earlier had been misled about what the agreed judgment called for. Both attorney and client say they wouldn't agree to the same judgment today.
Mayfield thinks the agreement should be revised because it makes "unreasonable demands on the woman. It calls for an inventory of every single plant in her yard. No one else in the neighborhood has to do that.
"It says she has to mulch -- what if she uses compost? It says her house has to be visible from the street, which it is. But no one else has to promise that."
The heart of the pact is Wright's promise to keep her yard pruned, trimmed and maintained, but it sets no specific standards.
Wright says she is maintaining her yard adequately; the association says she isn't. Wright says she's had support from her neighbors; the association says it's been getting complaints. There is evidence to support both sides.
Whether she is being forced to meet tougher standards than her neighbors is moot, contends Janecek, Sundown Glen's attorney. "What she agreed to may go beyond what's in her deed restrictions," she said. "But it's what she agreed to."
But Janecek conceded that deed restrictions often are generic and "rely on reasonable interpretations by reasonable people." Mayfield doesn't disagree:
"I think the question here is really what's reasonable. This isn't."
Hmm, that is interesting. They changed the picture on the website. The one in 92 is still correct, but that was posted from a different server.
Here it is, right now. Subject to change, of course. Cound't find the original story.
What, are they the Knights that say, "Ni"?
< /monty python >
I don't see the point in signing a HOA and then breaking your word. I would never live in such a sub-division myself and I have a very natural yard ---but out here it would look silly to have an overly manicured lawn.
I would have totally failed on my restoration project without herbicides.
I want you to imagine a weed that produces 5,000 seeds per plant annually that last 80 years in soil. I had an infestation of French broom that has been here 30 years over ten acres. When I cut them down there were 200-500 weeds per square yard the next spring in an area too harsh to support most grasses. It took ten years but the broom is now under control. I still spray, but it's down to about a pint of concentrate or so per year.
Fear not. Most modern herbicides have a half life of less than 30 days in soil, and but ten hours in sunlight. You would have to drink 6 gallons of the stuff I use on broom to reach the oral LD50.
Then there's catsear, the weed from hell. I'm still learning how to control that monster. My big problem is that the county doesn't spray and uses mowers to control roadside vegetation. Those mowers spread the weeds for miles every year.
Just keep in mind that the weeds are often more toxic than is the herbicide. Funny how the eco-nuts never seem to understand that. Consider hemlock, or starthistle for that matter.
5) I am a member of the Virginia Native Plant Society and my impression is that we reserve "invasive" for alien species, not native plants that belong in the habitat.
It's incorrect no matter who says it. There's invasive and then there's invasive exotic. Native species can be very aggressive. Around here, morning glories are particularly so.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad you have an interest in native plants. I just don't like it when somebody intones that a person should tolerate them when they ruin their plantings in a developed area. In much of California, oxalis looks like crap in the summer without irrigation.
We have plenty of room for natives in wildlands as it is, and not enough hands to keeep the weeds at bay in those areas (much less insects). Then there's reversing the disastrous fuel levels in forests, re-establishing groudcovers and understory species, then reintroducing animals... Exotics are one of the key failings of the habitat preservation paradigm. Try to put nature in a bell jar and watch it die.
There are plenty of non-native plants around here that are no problem at all in the wild. Some I leave as a sort of historical legacy to the early settlers around here (like agapanthas). In fact, non-native plants have played a key role in my restoration project by filling niches left open by weed removal and helping keep the invasive exotic populations under control until the natives could come back.
The science and art-form of habitat restoration is in its infancy. We have a ton to learn about how these systems work. Politicized science isn't making it any easier. I hope you found this exchange educational.
Anyone who has no contempt of court has never been in one.
It is obvious from this comment that you either didn't read the article or failed to comprehend what you read; the lady didn't just move in and let the place grow up around her.
As much as I disagree with busybodium, she's got a real legal problem; I guess things are tough all over.
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Alexis de Toqueville, Call Home.
Oh, you paint so pretty - I can see it now, the sneaky little devils slipping their salacious tendrils beneath the slats of the trellis, snaking their way across this yard and that and then, at dawn, sprouting full-bloom in Old Man Crochett's yard just as he stumbles out to get his morning Democrat Rag...
The word is propagate, BTW.
I thought pennicillin was supposed to solve that problem.
Or ..... that I wasn't refering specifically to her. It's obvious that you haven't read many of my posts in this thread.
Go buy another junk car.
Don't stop, tell us the rest.
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