BY EUAN BEAR

he bumpersticker on
her car reads “Tree

Hugging Dirt
Worshipper.” She comes to
the interview wearing. a
Green Mountain green
sweatshirt from Siteworks,
the landscaping company
she has worked for going
on 22 years. She freely
admits that what she likes
most about landscaping is
moving piles of dirt and '
neatening up yards. Laura
Benis is a dyke who really
digs dirt.

“I really just like
moving piles of dirt
around,” Laura explains
over scones and Mango
Mama juice at the Daily
Bread Bakery. The kind of
landscaping she’s been
doing for most of the last
22 years is about doing just
that, plus creatingbeds,
planting trees and shrubs,
doing lawn maintenance, re-
grading yards, and building
decks — and arbors, and
walkways, and patios, and
stone walls.

It was different in
California, where Laura
spent 1985-6 in between
stints at Siteworks working
in celebrity homes doing
plant care. “We’d be doing
things like spraying water
on concrete walkways to
get rid of the dead earth-
worms. It was fussy work,
not like here. I was behind
this big ficus in Julie
Andrews’ and Blake
Edwards’ house, washing
the leaves, and I just kept
finding myself humming
tunes from The Sound of

I Music! I thought that was

awful of me, I had to make
myself stop.”
Landscaping, to
Laura, is like endurance
sports, which she also
enjoys. “I like working my
way out of situations, find-
ing the most efficient and
best way of doing things, .
solving problems.” She
came to landscaping ‘after
graduating from UVM with
a degree in forestry and a
couple of years of various.

'~---v...-,.,.., . . . . . . . V . _ . . , .-

 

jobs: mucking horse stalls,
personal care attendant for a
quadraplegic, a season at
the Winooski Valley Park
District, and working as a
mechanic with her brother
Henry. He suggested she
apply at Siteworks because
“they’re good people.”

After 22 years, she
feels the physical strain a
bit more, and now that she’s
48, well, she uses more
helpful equipment rather
than muscling stones and
logs into place.

The Siteworks crews
use mostly organic fertiliz-
ers, very few chemicals,
and basically no pesticides.
“We like it that way — it’s

less toxic',”iLaura explains.

There is only one
answer for clients who want
a low-maintenance yard:
“Grass is the lowest mainte-
nance landscaping there is.”

 You know the old
saying about the carpenters
house-that’s falling-down
and the cobbler’s kids mm-
ning barefoot? It doesn’t
hold here. The yard of the
house she shares with part-
ner Pat Winer shows her
love of order and structure.
A home-made grape arbor
flanks the garage, while
stone steps mount the hill-
side to the upper gardens
behind the house. A rotting
shed used to lean on that
side of the house, and when
Laura took it down, she was
left with a hole to fill. Her
solution was a native-stone
retaining wall to contain
what is now well-planted
soil and bark mulch to the
left of the stone steps.

Pachysandra and
azalea climb the slope. Next
to the garage, a hollowed
out log shows Hens &
Chicks growing next to two
blue halves of a natural
geode. In the two upper gar-
dens (30 x 50 feet and 30 x
60), she and Pat will plant
vegetables.

It probably helps
that Laura works 2 days on
her own for private mainte-
nance clients. She likes hav-
ing and using her own tools,
a set of “just the right ones”

., WVKM

she’s collected over the
years — including a trans-
planting spade (painted
gold) that was a gift from
Siteworks when she left for
California. But after two
days on her own, she’s
ready to be back with the
team.

And Siteworks, she
says, have been “good peo-
ple” to work for. I ask if it
had ever made a difference
at work that she’s a lesbian,
and she says, “No, not real-
ly. It’s more that some men
have a hard time working
for a woman supervisor,

and then you add that I’m a
lesbian, and sometimes they
have a hard time with my
authority. There’s a lot of
turnover in this business,”
she adds, so she ends up
breaking in new guys every
year.

Siteworks has been
supportive of women as
crew chiefs,- she adds, and
often the site crews are
evenly divided by gender .—
but it’s not intentional.
Sometimes the crew ends

up entirely made up of
women, but it’s just whoev-
er happens to be on the ros-
ter that day, ,
You wouldn’t imag-
ine that Laura Benis would
be a couch potato, but dur-
ing high summer season in
landscaping, the thing she
likes to do most after work
is lie down on the couch.
“It’s_ strenuous. I have a
friend who wants me to go
hiking with her in the sum-
mer, but I don’t want to.
We’ll go ski all winter, but
I’m not out there all day
doing physical stuff first.”

And that, too, is a
part of landscaping that fits
with Laura’s style: she gets
four months off in the late
fall and winter to play and
travel and ski and hike to
her heart’s content. “I just
really want to glorify work-
ing outdoors. I can smell
the earth and the grass, hear
birds, see the way the light
is shining on the stones. It’s
not so much the landscap-
ing as being outdoors.” V

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