Handi-Scapes

About Handi-Scapes

Morning comes cold and blue to Campo, twenty-six hundred feet up in San Diego County's back country, and the granite boulders catch first light before anything else does. Handi-Scapes keeps lawns in this high, dry place — mowing, edging, pulling the weeds that creep in from the chaparral — where a patch of green has to be coaxed out of decomposed granite and defended from the summer sun. There is a particular satisfaction in a yard that holds its shape against so much open country, the line of a fresh cut running straight toward the live oaks. The work is patient and local, done for neighbors from Campo out to Lake Morena and Potrero. When the clippings are raked and the edge is clean, the green sits there like a small argument with the desert, and wins.