There is one point of fact upon which Ron Siegfried and the City of Lakewood agree. Here it is: When code-enforcement officer John Holmes came to tell Siegfried that his grass was too long and neighbors had complained, Siegfried was indignant and unrepentant. "I'm an American," both parties agree he said. "I don't have to put up with this."
Other than that, the facts are not facts, but widely varying interpretations with little common ground--except, of course, Siegfried's yard, where miscellaneous code infractions are alleged to have occurred.
Siegfried vs. the City of Lakewood has been escalating since the fall of 1995, with no end in sight. You never get to the bottom of a dispute such as this--except, perhaps, Talmudically.
Let's examine different aspects of the one thing we (think we) know to be true. Is Ron Siegfried an American? Yes. Did a fellow American complain about his lawn? More than once. Are Americans required by law to cut their grass? Well...the Constitution doesn't cover that, but zoning regs usually do. Does a lawn look better cut very short as opposed to left somewhat long? That depends on whether your landscaping ideal leans to British estate design or the Argentine pampas.
Siegfried, typically, favors neither.
"Now, most people trim their lawns in what you might call a crewcut--it's accepted," he muses. "But I am not into cutting my hair like a crewcut, so why should I do it to my lawn? In lawns and in hair, I like a nice style. Longish, with shapes cut in. Plus, when all this started, I couldn't cut my lawn, anyway. I was waiting to see if the English thyme and chamomile were going to come in like I wanted them to."
Siegfried's lawn--and his unorthodox view of how it should look--was what first drew the attention of municipal authorities. Since then, however, the general unruliness of his lot has expanded to include not just the front yard, but the side and back yards, which are crammed with construction materials that will come in handy someday, "and whether I brushed my teeth this morning, I wouldn't be surprised," Siegfried says. "But all I can tell you is, I never picked this fight."
A career carpenter/fix-it guy, Ron Siegfried had always taken advantage of the excellent salvage opportunities available to guys who happen to appear at construction and reconstruction sites with empty pickup trucks. When he saw, for instance, a pile of massive hundred-year-old beams, he put them in his truck and took them home. A bunch of pallets busted up outside a marble company--each with intriguing foreign lettering--cried out to be made into rustic tables, picture frames and country-style hutches.
"Yeah, yeah, I made all that stuff and had wood left over," he says. "I wake up in the morning wanting to make stuff. I'm the scrapmaster."
But something happens to scrapmasters who turn forty, as Siegfried did five years ago. "You stop going to bars, and all of a sudden you want to grow potatoes," he explains. "I wanted to make a garden. An ever-changing scene. An edible landscape, you know what I'm saying? All my yard had was a half-dead apple tree and hard clay dirt. I started reading good magazines and got some ideas."
Acting on those ideas, he sowed a "green manure" cover crop, in which buckwheat was left to grow all winter and then tilled into the soil to "fix the nitrogen, whatever that means," he says. "I started raspberries and old-fashioned hollyhocks, eight feet tall. Lots of scilla, tomatoes and chives, a little here and a little there until it became completely unmanageable and insane."
Although there's an undeniable methodical madness to Siegfried's garden, it also is quite an accomplishment, with astoundingly healthy perennials growing in mounds of compost and vines and flowers of all kinds shooting up toward the light in a classic cottage-garden style. Unlike the other yards in his neighborhood, Siegfried's has a rambunctious personality that is obvious even from a speeding car.
"Other gardens around here, I've noticed, are really, really tacky," he volunteers. "Pansies. It's scary. Those yards with twelve pansies in them, and that's it. Whew. And they call that gardening!"
At least they know what to call it. The same cannot be said for that copper-tubing framework, about eight feet by eight feet, which sits just to the right of Siegfried's wavily trimmed lawn. He offers a label. "Shock art--a little something to freak out my relatives," he says darkly, scurrying about, hooking up hoses. "You'll see. You'll see."
A few minutes later, water begins spurting from two pinholes at the top of the copper tubing. As water pressure increases, the spurt forms a sort of round ornament made of water. "Yes!" he says excitedly. "It's supposed to look like blowing glass, right? But there's also supposed to be a hummingbird feeder right behind it, and the vision is, you're supposed to have a hummingbird fly by at exactly the right moment, right around sunset, and that never happens, but that's the plan, which I thought of early one morning, so I just built it."
