Tim Bowers had a simple name for my gardening habits of yesteryear.

He referred to our yard as “The Winchester Mystery Garden.”

It was a great analogy.

There wasn’t a month that didn’t go by that we weren’t adding something new or taking something away.

Our home was on a corner lot on Pine Street. It had been built in 1950 just outside what was then the Manteca city limits on a quarter acre carved out of a former almond orchard.

To say it had a good-sized yard was an understatement, although it was dwarfed by the roughly acre or so acre kitty-corner across the street.

It is where the late Dr. Robert Winters had built a home with a large backyard large enough that his son,  the now retired Manteca High Principal Steve Winter, could legitimately have friends over to play a game of baseball.

Bowers thought I was a bit intense with my gardening habits.

How intense?

It is safe bet to say managers of garden centers from across the region would break out into smiles whenever they saw us pull up on a Saturday morning.

If you are a numbers person, the following might help you get an idea of what inspired Bowers to allude to the Winchester Mystery House the widow of the iconic gun manufacturer magnate was always tinkering with in San Jose.

*At the height of my rose madness, there were 172 rose bushes.

*Trees numbered nine. There were seven more at one time but room was needed for more roses.

*The shrub count was as high as three dozen.

*It took seven flats of gazanias  to create a yard-wide border between the sidewalk along the front and side yards of the lot to separate the lawn from the concrete.

*Every two weeks we set out between three and five 96-gallon green waste carts filled to the brim.

How far gone was I?

For my birthday one year, Cynthia bought a truckload of soil so I could create a mound on our corner of the intersection in order to plant more roses, shrubs, and other flowers.

I got the idea from a yard I saw on a Manteca Garden Club Tour. As an aside, they have one coming up next Saturday. The details are in a story below this column.

At the height of the grow and kill season, I was spending several hours a week in the yard.

I developed an obsession when it came to killing gophers.

It was the byproduct of  the ground below having more tunnels than the New York subway system from the neighborhood’s heyday as an almond orchard and the fact I was literally running all-that-they-could-eat smorgasbord for gophers.

That reminds me. There was one number I forget to mention.

In the gopher “wholly wars”, my primary defense strategy to make sure than even trees could take root, meant there was roughly 700 linear feet of chicken wire fencing cut into segments and barriers fashioned below plantings to keep gophers at bay.

I guess I was a bit too intense.

All doubts about whether I was going to let anything  stop me in my relentless drive to keep changing the yard were removed when I decided two blue source trees the previous owner had planted had to go.

It was in an area in the front yard where I wanted to create a  formal rose garden with 48 shrubs plus eight climbers along a grape stake fence.

I was inspired to do so as I found cutting the grass around them every week was a royal pain. Plus, it didn’t help that people walking by somehow confused the trees with a trash can.

 You’re probably wondering how I could fill five 96-gallon yard waste carts every two weeks.

Every mature tree previous owners had planted in the yard that I removed to replace with trees we preferred  or to make room for other things, left our yard in green carts.

That included three massive cherry trees in the backyard and assorted mature fruit trees.

The trees came down in bit and pieces. Branches were trimmed to meet city regulations for going into the carts.

Even the trunk of a tree was diced up enough to get  it in carts.

Root balls are a no-no for the city to take. So, I used axes and crowbars to break them down into little pieces to pass muster.

And to top that off, I wanted all of the roots gone as well.

This clearly took time given I did it myself and the only power tools I used was an eclectic chainsaw. My staging area for such work was always stacked high with tree debris to right size for the city to haul off.

The root balls for the two blue spruces were my Waterloo,

I had managed to cut off the roots and disengage the tap root by digging a massive hole and the creative use of an ax.

What I couldn’t do, though, was get the remaining root ball out of the holes I had dug.

So, I asked a yard service to do it for a healthy fee. They agreed to until they actually saw what I wanted done.

A bit irked, I decided to figure a way to do it myself.

Each, as I was to find out later when I finally had to hire a trash hauling firm to use equipment to remove them from the edge of the alley where I placed them when I couldn’t chop them up any smaller, weighed in excess of 200 pounds.

I had gotten the root balls out of the holes in a solo endeavor that employed crowbars and my pushing.

Long story short, it is the traumatic event that led to my needing two hernia surgeries.

Naturally, when I bought the house where I live now where the original owner had planted eight trees on a 6,240-square-foot lot, I had to change things up.

John Alves, a neighbor across the street, refers to it as “The Jungle.”

I removed all of the lawn area, back and front. I continued my obsession with roses until I finally got my fill.

They are all now gone.

In their place, I planted even more trees.

By hand, I removed the concrete sidewalks in the front and back yard using a chisel, sledge hammer and crowbars. Clearly, I have a need to be entertained or else a Luddite streak a mile wide I don’t want to acknowledge.

The front yard is dominated by a  massive growth of asparagus ferns, fast growing softwood trees which means draping branches and assorted other greenery.

Yes, it channels a jungle. But on the flipside, my days of trying to be the Winchester yard of Manteca are long gone.

That said, I’m sure my yard is still a mystery to more than a few people although every cat in a block or so radius sees it as a day spa with unlimited bathroom privileges.

This column is the opinion of editor, Dennis Wyatt, and does not necessarily represent the opinions of The Bulletin or 209 Multimedia. He can be reached at dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com

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