In late June the evening holds past eight over Hempstead, and that is the hour a planted bed finally looks like what it was meant to be. Mejia Landscaping builds and keeps those beds — shrubs shaped, mulch laid and edged, new plantings set in, sod rolled onto bare ground — and mows and trims the lawn around them on a steady turn. Kennedy Memorial Park a few streets away shows what patient tending does to open ground over the long run; a front yard answers to the same attention on a smaller scale. The crew's favorite moment is when the mulch line gets cut: that dark, crisp curve dividing bed from grass, the one detail a passerby registers without knowing why. Residential yards and small commercial grounds in Hempstead and the places just past it.