There’s a front yard on Auburn Avenue near Seventh Street where the weeds are tall enough to hide a couple of grazing elk.

And perhaps do.

I drive by the house at least a few times most days during my grueling one-mile, zero-stoplight commute, and one morning, along about dawn, I thought I saw a reddish-brown flank among the stalks of kochia and other species I couldn’t discern from the driver’s seat.

But that might have been a figment conjured by my eyes, which aren’t what they used to be.

(And frankly they’ve never been anything to brag about; more than four decades have passed since the first in a series of optometrists had a close look and judged that only with considerable optical aid could I be allowed to roam free.)

The house has been for sale and apparently is vacant.

Certainly no one could have reached the front door without a machete and a great deal of slashing.

Baker City’s property maintenance ordinance requires that property owners, between May 1 and Nov. 1, keep weeds and grass trimmed to no more than 10 inches high.

(The ordinance actually reads “all weeds, thistles, grass or other rank or plant growth,” which I find an intriguing mixture of the general — weeds, grass and other plant growth — and the specific — thistles. Perhaps the prickly nature of thistles explains why they, among the litany of weedy species, were singled out.)

Mike Flynn, the code enforcement officer for the Baker City Police Department, placed a notice on the home’s front door dated July 6. It states that the owner had 10 days to cut the vegetation, and that the property would be inspected again on July 16.

The ordinance, as ordinances typically do, contains exemptions.

The 10-inch rule does not apply to “vegetation grown and used for agricultural purposes.” That’s appropriate, it seems to me, since there are still lots within the city limits where livestock graze and where tall grass is fodder rather than an eyesore.

The second exception is for “vegetation on slopes that are non-accessible to self-propelled mowers.”

Notwithstanding the troubling concept of a mower that, in our era of artificial intelligence, is truly “self-propelled,” this also seems to me sensible. It doesn’t apply to the Auburn Avenue yard, in any case, which is about as flat as Kansas.

(Not that you can tell the lay of the land, given that you can’t see the actual land because of the weeds. You can’t see much of the front porch, come to that.)

The last of the three exceptions, unlike the other two, is rather more subjective.

“Areas actively managed and maintained in a safe and attractive manner for pasture or large scale landscape gardening applications so long as weeds are controlled and no fire danger is created.”

Attractive, in particular, seems to me an inapt adjective, conspicuous among the generally objective prose of a municipal code.

The foliage in this yard is certainly “large scale,” especially in height.

And I suppose that under a most charitable definition the weeds qualify as landscaping.

Much in the way that a drift of Busch Light cans and the innards from a four-speed transmission do on certain properties.

Despite the density of the weeds, or perhaps because of it, they’re as lush and green as a tropical jungle, so there doesn’t appear to be much fire danger. There are also a handful of stalks that appear to be sunflowers, so some bright yellow might soon appear amid the sea of green.

But even the most elastic approach to language can’t stretch it far enough to describe this patch of weeds as “controlled,” to quote the ordinance.

Indeed the yard is the antithesis of control — the natural outgrowth, as it were, of weeds left to their own devices and with the aid of a late spring that was rather damp.

Although the ordinance requires property owners to deal with weeds, it also allows the city, after a warning such as the notice that Flynn posted on July 6, to call in the scythe, so to speak, and then bill the owner.

If the responsible party is as apathetic about the bill as about the weeds, the city council can pass a resolution attaching the unpaid balance as a lien on the property.

I’ve been more amused than upset as I’ve watched the weeds grow at such a prodigious rate. It’s not the first time I’ve wished the scientists would have a go at grafting the trait for rapid growth onto more desirable vegetation. I would pay dearly for, say, a maple tree that would reach maturity in a few months rather than a like number of decades. I daresay the company that could create such a hybrid would soon be flush with orders.

In the meantime, I keep wondering, on my daily drive down Auburn, whether I might see in the yard not an elk but rather a few goats.

Lacking a high-powered string trimmer, goats, as I understand it, offer the simplest solution to a surplus of vegetation. They’ll eat pretty much anything with chlorophyll.

Even, I’m told, the thistles for which the city’s weed ordinance harbors a particular disdain.