Up close it looks nothing like cannabis. The stalks are thick and woody and sometimes reddish. The upper leaves are heart-shaped and plain. In late summer it blooms in big creamy-yellow hibiscus flowers with dark wine-red throats that open in the morning and close by afternoon. Bees love it. I had grown it for two summers without a single problem.
Darlene Fisk lived in the house uphill from mine. Her back deck was raised high over a walkout basement and faced west across my yard toward the Owyhee Mountains, which turn the colour of a ripe peach at sunset. You could see it from my kitchen window: Darlene on the deck in the evening with a glass of white wine and a pair of birding binoculars she never seemed to point at birds. Her husband, Rick, ran the grounds crew at the county golf course and was hardly ever home in daylight. When he was, he mowed in perfect diagonal stripes and waved at me with two fingers off the handle, like a man waving from inside a car.
Darlene brought me a welcome basket the week I moved in. It had a candle, a bottle of local huckleberry syrup, and a printed copy of the CC&Rs, the bylaws, and the Architectural Review Guidelines, with neon sticky flags marking the pages she thought I should read first. The flags were on Article VII, Section 3 (Trash Receptacles), Section 7 (Fences and Walls), and Section 12 (Nuisances).
"We have a very high standard here," she told me, standing in my empty living room. "People choose Larkspur because they know what they're getting."
"It's lovely," I said, and meant it. The sidewalks were wide. There were young maples and a pond with a fountain, and the greenbelt behind my house had a gravel path where people walked dogs and where, I would later learn, a family of red foxes came through at dawn.
"If you have any questions about what's allowed," Darlene said, "you come to me first. Not the management company. Me. They don't know this neighborhood the way I do."
I thanked her, and later I read every word of the documents, because that's who I am. I didn't need the sticky flags. I would have read them anyway.
* * *
The first year was fine. My first kenaf crop barely reached five feet, because I planted it late and the soil was builder's fill with a sprinkle of topsoil, like a cake with frosting only on top. Darlene waved from her deck. I waved back. Once she told me my hostas looked "a little tired," and I agreed, because they did.
The trouble started at the annual meeting that January.
Annual meetings at Larkspur Commons were held in the clubhouse by the pool. There were folding chairs, a coffee urn, and a plate of grocery-store cookies with frosting the colour of a highlighter. About forty people came, which the management company rep told me afterward was a record. I learned later that the record was because of the agenda. Item six was a proposal called the Enhanced Landscape Standards, and it had leaked.
Darlene presented it herself, with slides. It set out an approved plant list for front and side yards, a maximum height for "ornamental or agricultural vegetation" of six feet anywhere on a lot, and a new fine schedule: fifty dollars a day for any violation not cured within seventy-two hours of notice. The board, she explained, would adopt it by resolution that night, "to save everybody the trouble of another meeting."