How Does Your Garden Grow?

Peaceful retreat or eyesore?
Wildwood Crest wild garden attracts fauna, ire of neighbors

By MEGGAN CLARK Health/Science Writer, (609) 272-7209
Press of Atlantic City
Published: Monday, July 17, 2006
Updated: Monday, July 17, 2006

WILDWOOD CREST — Bob Kole likes the simple moments in life, like picking a ripe tomato in his backyard or relaxing on the porch after work, sipping a beer and watching the birds.

Kole's home, a triplex with a strip of tall flowers out front, isn't fancy by Wildwood standards, but it's home. The backyard is crowded with sunflowers, pine trees, bird feeders, vegetables, a birdbath and a soccer net, and his porch is similarly crowded — books, sea shells, wind chimes and a small brown fridge give it a comfortable, unpretentious feel.

Ten years ago, Kole says, you could still see the ocean from his back porch. The neighbors had picking rights in his garden and he had swimming rights in their pool. His dad, Vincent, who bought the Morning Glory Road home as a vacation place three decades ago, had retired there from Philadelphia and grew huge tomatoes that won prizes at the county fair.

That was back when the neighbors didn't mind the Koles' garden.

But things can change a lot in 10 years, and now, with housing growing faster than the wildest zucchini, Kole says there isn't much room in Wildwood Crest for a garden, wildlife, birds or his family anymore.

Just five years ago, Wildwood Crest issued only 33 residential building permits. By 2005, building had had increased more than tenfold. Nearly every street and street corner in the borough seems to be under construction — raw dusty dirt holes, big yellow machines, piles of cinder blocks.

The new houses are big. They're expensive. They're often vinyl-sided and surrounded by narrow strips of concrete and white pebbles in the place of grass. They replace smaller, older, more modest homes, like the old sea captain's house and little Cape where the Koles' neighbors used to live.

“We used to be able to see the ocean,” Kole says. “Now all I look at is vinyl siding. You're out here and all you can hear is central air conditioning.”

The noise is ever-present, a wet muffled roar.

These days, Kole has one of the few wild yards on Morning Glory Road. Squirrels climb his trees. Cardinals visit the bird feeders. The confusion and profusion of his garden yields beets, eggplant, tomatoes, peas, raspberries and sunflowers.

To Kole, it's a garden — the garden that's been there for 30 years.

Breeding complaints

But to his new neighbors, it's nothing short of an eyesore. It's earned him numerous visits from town code-enforcement officers and citations. Some of them, he says, are apologetic. But the codes are the codes.

“I don't want to get the borough in trouble or anyone else in trouble,” Kole says, adding that one code inspector even asked him for some daffodils to bring to his wife. “The borough wouldn't be bothering me if it wasn't the neighbors complaining all the time.”

Kole's problems with his neighbors are not rare. As development booms along the southern shore and trophy vacation homes take the place of old working- and middle-class year-round dwellings, a backyard garden can become a lightning rod for dissent.

“Quite a few people do have to contend with ill-informed township officials who are trying to enforce something like a weed ordinance that really doesn't apply to a wildlife habitat,” said the Cape May Bird Observatory's Pat Sutton. “(A weed ordinance) applies to something that is neglected and a wildlife garden, it's not a neglected, nuisance situation.”

Sutton teaches classes on gardening for butterflies, birds and wildlife as part of the observatory's efforts to increase and preserve wildlife habitat in the face of New Jersey's burgeoning population. She teaches people to plant native species, not popular, non-native ornamentals; to grow patches of milkweed for the Cape's famous monarch butterfly migration, to leave enough wildness and greenery that small animals and birds will thrive.

Wildlife gardeners love their little patches of rampant, unfettered beauty, the butterflies, birds and squirrels they attract — even the caterpillars, worms and bugs.

Need for education

But when the neighbors have a lawn of white rock and concrete, or perfectly manicured green, problems can erupt. It's so common, in fact, that the New Jersey Audubon Society's Web page on gardening for wildlife includes a section called, “So, your neighbors don't like your backyard habitat.”

The advice: If you're going to have a wildlife garden, educate your neighbors, build paths and plant pretty native flowers to make your property more attractive, and, if necessary, fight your municipality's code violation citation in court.

Kole, who can rattle off the history of the Jerusalem Artichoke like most people can recount a Philadelphia sports team's season, sees his garden as something of a fortress, a refuge for animals and birds left with fewer and fewer places to live in the Crest. The past few years, he's started seeing more squirrels in his garden, a phenomenon he attributes to the development.

“They're cutting down more and more older trees. Where are the squirrels going to go?” he says. “Nature has sort of been pushed off the board for the sake of making money and development.” He says he wants to give his children a sense of where things come from, and birds a place to rest. Also, he says, he wants to be left alone.

Wildwood Crest's code-enforcement office didn't return calls and an e-mail seeking comment for this story, and Mayor Carl Groon could not be reached Thursday and did not return two phone calls Friday.

But Kole's neighbors spoke freely, although they refused to give their names.

“He's trying to use you idiots because the city wants him to clean up his yard and comply with codes,” shouted a next-door neighbor, who Kole identified as Chris, from his back porch.

He and a female companion shouted at Kole for several minutes, saying his yard is a mess and his tree is encroaching on his property.

“My tree was here before your building!” Kole shouted back. “Trees should have rights, Chris.”

Asked if she wanted to comment for an article, the woman replied, “Do you want to be sued? I don't want to talk about it because it's asinine, that's why.”

Chris also declined to be formally interviewed.

“If it it appears (in the paper), I'm going to sue the living (expletive) out of you,” he said. “I'm going to sue you personally.”

Chris lives in a new, white, towering new home with a newly poured concrete driveway and sidewalks. Kole says Chris' late father used to have a smaller home on the site that was torn down to make room for the new one. He says the family also used to have picking rights in Vincent Kole's garden.

Up for sale

“I think my days are numbered here,” Kole says wearily, after the neighbors retreat inside. “It's a shame. I wonder what the future is going to bring in Wildwood.”

Kole says he has reluctantly put his home up for sale, advertising it as “for sale by gardener” in the hopes that the buyer will continue the family tradition. But he admits that, with the land valued far higher than the house, his family home is likely to be bulldozed if he sells.

“This was a working class town, families coming here from the city for a week of vacation,” he says. “I feel I have roots here. This is my family's house.” He glances around, at the pristine, hostile white walls on all sides, where the view of the ocean used to be.

“Now, I want to leave.”

It's hard to believe, looking out over Kole's backyard, that the Wildwoods were so named because they were “wild woods,” a land of dunes and vine-tangled forest that until the turn of the century was virtually uninhabited.

“Today, when you drive through the Wildwoods, you can hardly find a tree,” Sutton says. “Everything that's not protected ends up looking like a cityscape. That frightens me.”

She calls the Wildwoods of today, with their sidewalks and pebble lawns “sterile, very sterile.”

“Heaven forbid a migrating bird should end up in Wildwood Crest unless they find their way to the Hereford Inlet Lighthouse or this gentleman's backyard,” she says.

To e-mail Meggan Clark at The Press:Meggan.Clark@pressofac.com