At two in the morning, I carried a small bucket of wet clay and a pair of garden gloves across the street. My neighbor’s SUV sat in his driveway, gleaming under the porch light. I did not touch the car. Instead, I knelt beside the driveway’s edge and began pressing small, neat stones into a long, curving line, spelling out one short word that only a gardener would understand.

When I finished, I stepped back and smiled. Then I rang a different doorbell, two houses down, where a retired landscape designer named Mrs. Alvarez answered in her robe, holding a flashlight. “Did you bring them?” she whispered. I nodded and lifted the lid of a crate, and she gasped. Inside were forty tiny seedlings, wrapped in damp cloth. By sunrise, his driveway would never look the same.