Zen Garden

About Zen Garden

Hayward wakes under a sheet of bay fog that slips down off the hills and burns away by mid-morning, and that is a good hour to be cutting grass. Zen Garden keeps lawns here in the East Bay, where the winter rains turn the slopes above Garin green almost overnight and the dry season comes back on slow and gold. The work is mowing, edging, trimming, weeding, and carrying the clippings away — plain things, repeated until the line along a walkway is straight enough to sight down. There is a quiet satisfaction in turf that ends clean at the concrete, the way a raked bed ends clean at a stone. These yards sit in the flats between the marsh air and the oak hills, taking wind from one side and heat from the other, so each one asks for something slightly different. Zen Garden works Hayward and out toward San Lorenzo, Castro Valley, Union City and San Leandro.