The Garden Lady

In To Kill a Mockingbird, you may remember a character by the name of Miss Maudie Atkinson, a woman who "loved everything that grew in God's green earth, even the weeds."  The Buffer Zone has its own Miss  Maudie.  Ours is not an old-fashioned Southern woman in a straw hat and men's coveralls who attends to azaleas and rhododendrons, but a woman who is so passionate about growing things that she has given up any idea of a front lawn and uses her entire patch of earth and sun to grow vegetables and flowers.
Dressed in old T-shirts and jeans, her hair cropped short, she has a straight forward manner that would never demure to any kind of man.
Beyond growing things, she is also knowledgable and active in the liberal side of politics, neighborhood gossip, and all things community driven.  She has a PhD, sometimes drives an old VW Beetle, regularly drives a pick-up truck, makes a load of fruit pies once a year for all her friends, and walks a dog we call The Art Critic twice a day.
(Once we had a yard sale which included a large painting we'd stood up against the telephone pole at the front of our yard.  While we stood around chatting with The Garden Lady, her adorable (really, he is cute) dog peed on the painting.  Hence the nickname.)
Rarely does The Garden Lady do anything to cause us to raise our eyebrows as many of the other neighbors do.  But she is often the source for definitive, reliable information on just what the heck is going on around here.