Features
Welcoming the Handsome Stranger
This Dyke Digs Dirt!
by Euan Bear
The 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 creating beds, 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 earthworms. 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 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, finding 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 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 fertilizers, very few chemicals, and basically no pesticides. “We like it that way – it’s less toxic,” Laura explains.
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There is only one answer for clients who want a low-maintenance yard: “Grass is the lowest maintenance landscaping there is.”
You know the old saying about the carpenter’s house that’s falling down and the cobbler’s kids running barefoot? It doesn’t hold here. The yard of the house she shares with partner Pat Winer shows her love of order and structure. A home-made grape arbor flanks the garage, while stone steps mount the hillside 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 gardens (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 maintenance clients. She likes having and using her own tools, a set of “just the right ones” she’s collected over the years – including a transplanting 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 people” to work for. I ask if it had ever made a difference at work that she’s a lesbian, and she says, “No, not really. 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 whoever happens to be on the roster that day.
You wouldn’t imagine that Laura Benis would be a couch potato, but during 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 summer, 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 working 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 landscaping as being outdoors.”