Downes Company

About Downes Company

Fog comes up the Long Beach Peninsula most mornings, soft as wool over the shore pines, and Ocean Park wakes to grass beaded with salt damp. Downes Company mows and trims through it — the wet-sand months and the bright August ones alike — holding lawns even on ground that is more dune than dirt. Salal presses in at every border out here, so a crisp trimmed line against it is a small and satisfying argument. By afternoon the wind swings in off the Pacific and the whole peninsula smells of cranberry bog and cedar. Lawn care up and down the Highway 103 stretch, in a town where green is earned an inch at a time.