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The Vista Filare Homeowners Association is a clueless clucking clan of miscreant doltish control freaks. It is infatuated with sickly ivy, broad naked compost vistas, and grass scalped to scarred mud by Mexican illegals. Said "gardeners" launch into chainsaw frenzies when insulted by flower buds or wood polluted with green leaves. After 20 expensive years the Vista Filare Homeowners Association standard of horticultural excellence is a particulate rotted wood expanse dotted with vulgar Agapanthus bulbs, their leaves having been butchered off for the winter (e.g., spring replacement - possibly with a surreptitious retro-slosh of mordida in association).
After our podocarpus trees were chainsawn to stubs ("trimmed for increased vigor") tract housing prices at sale fell about $15,000. No tree may cast shade in Irvine. Visit any parking lot or park to confirm. Burn, baby, burn in sweltering summer heat. Air conditioning burning electricity boosts the economy.
Uncle Al likes flowers - the bigger, more grotesque, more fragrant the better. Purple Devil's Trumpet, Datura metel, grows to a 2x2 foot bush with hundreds of fragrant 6- inch double trumpet aubergine and white blooms each year. It is in the book! Uncle Al's daturas are five feet wide and high. (Sandy Smolinsky cajoled hers into small trees.) They grace the front of his home, there to thrust deeply into Vista Filare Homeowners Association swinish puckered faces. Three seeds or a leaf if ingested can be lethal (tropane alkaloids). Mojados gardeners attack with lawnmowers and weed eaters.
Uncle Al grows South African pencil tree (Euphorbia tirucalli, flame variety). Its plentiful white latex sap will chew through skin and destroy eyes (phorbol esters). Spring brings fiery vermilion new growth and the idiots chainsaw it, and scream. Two years later they have all been replaced with new idiots who do it again, disturbing the cats with their caterwauling.
Larger caliber ammo is obviously required. Aristolochia gigantea 'Brasiliensis' has 100 in^2 cleaved slab of raw meat flowers pollinated by flies. Uncle Al's specimen (www.logees.com) thrice performed to spec in this its first year. Alas, only its tuberous roots are lethal (aristocholic acid). Blood orange trees have inch-long thorns. You can imagine Official displeasure eructated when two towering dwarf trees are covered with fragrant blossoms or ripe fruit. YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO GROW ORANGE TREES. Bite me - in Orange County.
Savor a plant such as this: The razor-sharp margins of its long strap leaves are edged with fiendish hooks. They tear rather than cut. These are bad news for Chilean Andes sheep. Woolly fleece becomes entangled and a grazing sheep can find itself attached worseningly helpless to huge clumps. Marooned and pinned, sheep perish from thirst. The hapless beasts (victims!) becomes slow-release fertilizer. This plant is a three-foot mounded tangle of green razor wire. It contiguously propagates with pups budding off its root crowns.
At some eight years of age the mature plant sends up a mammoth six to nine foot spike covered with hundreds of metallic two inch-plus turquoise flowers bearing bright orange centers, each rich with milliliters of nectar.
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Can it get any better than Puya berteroniana? Assuredly a beauty like this is available... nowhere. The very few domestic seedmongers who advertise it are perpetually sold out. How lucky First World civilization is that the British Empire plundered and preserved everything of value in the ancient world (through the 1800s). Sheep-eating puya was safely brought home to John Bull's voluptuous greenhouses (www.chilternseeds.co.uk/) long before loathsome indigens discovered they had feigned rights.
Uncle Al's higher-numbered neighbor is a retired Irish cop from New York, as in shanty Irish not lace Irish. The pig putbig yellow plastic flowers in his window boxes. It looks like crap. He then screwed some repulsive "color packs" into Vista Filare compacted clay and caliche subsoil. They are unflowered moribund non-growing crap. He is a hero to porcine officialdom .
Uncle Al's lower-numbered neighbor joined in ripping out Vista Filare Homeowners Association common ground atrocities. Four weekends of massive masculine sweating effort and good beer dug deep some 800 lbs of steer manure into what became real soil. Add a winter of El Niño rains to wash out the salt and two 10-lb bags of earthworms. Thereafter, plant at will.
Said copacetic neighbor put in a long hedge of bright red hibiscus and received contingent threatening letters from the Vista Filare Homeowners Association. His kid, sodden with dad's bad attitude, recently returned from abundantly killing Iraqis with US Marine hardware. Perhaps dad will send Junior to parlay as the opportunity arises. Upon learning of Uncle Al's next planting cycle two years down the pike the elder stones-bearing man laughed and said,
Let the plants decide. Perhaps they will settle for slashing a few legs and drinking of bright red mammalian nectar, perhaps not. I think I'll name it Audry III. "Feed me!"
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