When we first moved to the house we now live in some 23 years ago, a young couple was already occupying their house right next door, and had been for several years. Our house was built two years after most of the houses on the street were built, a later addition, as an experimental model for which a house-lot had been set aside and left empty.

We were delighted to meet the young pair, all the more so that they had an infant, a child only eight months old at that time. We were to become friendly with the young woman, not so her husband, who was afflicted with a severe case of social dysfunction, a man who did all he could to avoid meeting people's eyes straight on, a man who would cross the street rather than have to come face-to-face with someone he knew very well was a neighbour.

Oddly enough, his wife was a bright, chatty young woman, exuding extroversion while he was a hermit-crab, so much so that when her parents came for visits from their home in London, Ontario, they chose to drive a trailer which they would live in, parked in the driveway, and when the trailer was sold, they rented a motel room and visited with what would become two grandchildren, during the day.

Our neighbour attributed her husband's blighted introversion to his mother's stern upbringing, and perhaps there's something to it, since his older sister was also severely socially impaired. Although when we met and spoke with the parents both were elderly, spry and very friendly. She sought social outlets wherever she could find them and delighted in throwing 'garden parties' in the summer, inviting neighbours for an afternoon of tea and chats, while her husband was at work.

She was an avid gardener, and knew the names of plants much better than I did. She would plant something, then leave whatever it was to its own devices. Planting was fun and she loved it, weeding and other work associated with gardens was a pain, and who doesn't think that way? She liked decorating her garden and was quite clever about it, once ornamenting a large mirror to appear as though it was an open gate with an intriguing view beyond, and the effect from a distance was stunning. She painted her wooden garden gate with large, attractive notional flowers and that too was excellently done.

And then, over the years, the neglect began to show and it was pretty dismal. She had enthusiastically planted a spruce, a crabapple and a maple tree in the backyard, along with shrubbery and perennials. And in the front, she planted a maple quite close to where the builder that planted a pine, as required by the municipality with all houses newly built.

Their lawns were a mess of weeds; she had read somewhere that clover was good for grass and had seeded both front and back with clover and the clover seemed to invite an incredible number of weeds. We picked the weeds out of our grass by hand, she bought a gadget to do it, and then never used it.

I once tried to convince her that she should take advantage of the rich soil that resulted from her pine tree dropping needles for so many years, that bottom branches which were dead anyway, should be removed from the tree and that would give her another garden, a shade garden that would welcome shade-loving plants. (A great idea that we in fact, practised ourselves and out of that enjoying a garden under our own pine. When the pine was removed, the garden was left and our planting plan left us with an attractive garden and lawn, in contrast to the dismal results of theirs.)

Our Great Daibutsu Buddha now sits on top of the stump of the pine that was removed.

Instead, the pile of needles simply grew apace, and nothing grew under or around both trees, they became a desert and what grass there was dried up. She seemed to give up on gardening altogether which was a pity since at one time her place looked very presentably attractive. And she truly did enjoy it. Eventually the perennials began to prove that even neglect wouldn't destroy some plants that seemed to thrive on it.

Her husband hated everything that was green and growing, complaining about the ornamental evergreens she had planted, and eventually he began ripping them out as they were never trimmed and had outgrown their fresh attractiveness. And then on Friday a tree removal company showed up, and the crew set to work cutting down and removing the maple and the pine out front, and the spruce and the ornamental crab in the back, leaving the red maple in place. Since the maple had struggled for years to compete with the other two trees that were crowding it and impeding its share of sun, it now looks straggly.

We won't miss the spruce, since it was planted too close to the property line, hanging over our side of the fence and dropping detritus continually and nor will we miss the pine from their front lawn since it too had long since crossed over to our side, and in the winter snow-heavy boughs had a tendency to tip over onto our small ornamental trees, breaking their branches; and nor will we again have to rake up the needles it shed on our driveway, nor continually pull maple seedlings that drifted over to our garden beds and even growing in our many garden pots. We never did complain, since what's the point, it's not something that's deliberately done.

And for their part they'll no longer have to rake up fallen maple leaves in autumn, although truth be told they seldom did, allowing the wind to take them all over the street and onto people's lawns. What their own lawn and backyard look like now that they're no longer screened by the now-absent trees is quite pitiable, including revealing that their backyard fence has broken off its moorings and part of it is simply lying over on the cedar hedge of the people living behind them.