these californians and their landscaping

I remember visiting CA when I was a kid and thinking "wow, even the freeways are landscaped." People are serious about landscaping out here. And it's a style which is unique to the west coast.
This feeling has been confirmed by my recent city home beautification projects.
A row of hedges?! Never!
More than one of the same plant, in a LINE? Are you crazy?

Houses in the rest of the country look like this:



But if you live here, and your front yard doesn't look like this, then you've got "blight":



I call it crazy-plant-house. I'll admit it, we have a crazy-plant-house. I keep cutting them down, but they keep growing back and making it more plant-y.
The previous owners just went nutz, there's no order to it.

There's a house on Arapaho Road in Richardson, TX right before you get to the shopping center at Custer-- it's got all kinds of plants out front.
You know the one I'm talking about, Texans?
And I always thought that lunatics must live there. What normal person puts 50 kinds of bushes and trees and flowers in their front yard?

Yeah, now I'm the lunatic.

(Oh and the grass never dies here. I guess it doesn't die in Washington or Oregon either, I hear. It's very weird. And it also requires mowing, by yours truly with her scissor cut mower, all year long.)

too...many...plants!