Taking a rain day, or March Misery

The Wood Pigeons in their Tulip Tree

After a long and difficult day on the couch, writing, organizing photos in my laptop, and preparing for Couch by Couch West (enjoy Neko Case and Liza Case), I decided it was time to go out and take relief in the garden, maybe sawing out the rest of the overgrown ivy climbing the garden wall up into the neighbors' neglected fig tree, or maybe raking the bottom garden lawn and burning some more stuff before the rain begin, for it will begin. I have learned in 9 springs in my garden that March is the dry month, making it the perfect month to do the garden clean-up and pruning and burn the cuttings.

Of course, if we are allowed to burn stuff in our gardens, it is because it is generally assumed that this is still the wet time at the end of the winter, so it is generally safe to burn stuff until May, when it begins to rain, and it gets dangerous, but it is supposed to be dry and warm by then, so --

Never mind.

The month -- and I am making an allowance for February 28 by counting it in the month of March for literary purposes -- began with a severe pruning of the two yews, my "sentinel" yews, at the top of the stairs down into the garden. Start, I figured, with what you see every time you leave the house, and that of what your husband complains most.

Ah. Peace and quiet, and thanks. Gratitude is lovely.

The next day, March came in like a lion's maw in my garden, and it's not over yet. No wind, but a whirlwind of pruning and burning. Almost every day, the burning pile reformed and then disappeared in a conflagration, smoke, flames, ashes and sparks jumping into the air. I have ruined one fleece top I have worn for skiing and everything else for 13 years, and one of my husband's favorite organic cotton, long-sleeved shirts I was wearing underneath. They have identical perfectly round holes in exactly the same place on the right upper arm. Now I know why it's important to make clothing anti-inflammable.

I attacked the whatever that tree is down by the gazebo. The one that looked like a Blow-pop pruned, the head of which was leaning over the Rose of Sharon along the bottom garden wall after the weight of snow it carried in December.

I was not sad to see it go.

That was followed in the same afternoon by the gigantic yew just below that had also been damaged by the heavy snow of December. Heavy for Moosesucks.

We were especially not sad to see it begin to disappear.

Aching and feeling my carpal tunnel making its return, hands sound asleep long after I awoke in the mornings, I went after the second terrace plants and shrubs -- the Vanhoutten Spirea that looked like Animal, the Fuchsia magellanica, lavender and the lush and abundant moss in the sparse grass. Slender branches. Easy prey.

There won't be many -- or even any -- sprays of tiny white flowers on the spirea, but that's the way it goes. I'll prune it in November this year.

Then what? Oh, in between the Vanhoutten Spirea and the last of the lavender and fuchsia, I cut down the several meter high trunks of what was supposed to be a Snowball Viburnum bush. Bushes are not several meters high in my book. I call those "trees". This one had lost it years ago, and all that grows now are suckers and these trunks.

This was the first step in destroying its stump and getting rid of it altogether as part of the clearing of the bank and these plants, as well as the hedge across from it, to make place for some sort of shelter for the motorcycles, the old wood boat behind the low cinder block walls, and garden shed. Dream on. I can't even seem to manage to finish the inside of the house.

I am hearing about that from my husband. Trust me. It isn't as easy as pruning down the sentinel yews.

Partially recovered, anyway, I attacked the next big horrible project -- clearing out the top of the high wall behind the barbecue on the gazebo terrace. The last time I did this was 2005. It was, if that is possible, worse then. But back then, it probably hadn't been done since the barbecue was built in 1991. This took two days, March 10 and March 16.

I am still recovering from the bug bites (fleas, I think) and the thorn pricks from the Firethorn shrubs, with their poisonous (for me) several centimeter long thorns on each and every unyielding branch. If Hell has hedges, they are certainly made of Firethorn shrubs.

Between the two skirmishes of the Battle of the Top of The Wall on the 10th and the 16th, I did something. I know I did. Let's see -- yes, I took a little vacation and hand pruned the Saint John's Wort down to the ground.

So, where did I start this? Yes, I got up off the couch to go out and continue, and what did I see, other than the pair of Wood Pigeons in their Tulip Tree? Rain. Rain falling in the fish-pond-in-the-old-fountain. Rain falling into the shocking pink and deep blue hyacinths.

Rain.

I felt relief.

I have pruning elbow from all of this. I think I'll watch the quarter-finals at Indian Wells.

....

Boughcuts do not hurt

The mess

It is still the forenoon, and I have finished the yews.

I have not cleaned up. There is the Nordic Combined team competition. I have my priorities straight.

Last evening, I lopped off (makes it sound so easy; it's not) a meter in height. This morning, I got up, took the dogs and the trash out, made my coffee and gritted my teeth. I was determined to be useful (or yewsful) and headed down to the far edge of the middle terrace to check out the growth on the 'Daniel Deronda' clematis I thought I killed last August, but which I discovered to have been sprouting discreet leaf buds amidst the overgrown ivy and the blades of the daylilies, and it occurred to me to see what the yews looked like from below. Would they be better shorter from that perspective? Fia sat her butt down in the St. John's Wort bank behind the little hedge of box to watch me watch.

"Fia. Sors de là."

I don't need to yell. I don't need to get excited. I just need to tell her, You are not welcome to sit in my St. John's Wort. No, not even if it isn't high season yet. She hopped over the box and sat her butt down next to me, and then she watched vaguely for whatever it was I was watching.

Shorter. It could definitely be shorter by a good 60 cm.

Besides, when you realize how tall they had grown, you understand that the branches are very thick right up to the top of the bush. It's actually better to take them down farther, as well as to remove large branches near the perimeter, than you might actually want them so that you can let slender, new growth push upwards and outwards. It makes future pruning, if you actually do it regularly, much easier.

Fia followed me back up through the fallen wisteria leaves and the yew boughs covering the steps, and I went to work.

It was hard-going. For the fattest of the boughs, I had to wedge one long handle against my rib cage and use both hands to pull the other handle, and that balanced on my ladder. I don't bother fearing injury. I'll deal with it when it happens. It would be a lot easier if I got my tools sharpened, though. One more item on my "to do" list to infinity and beyond. Bough after bough landed on the cutting pile, and up and down the ladder I went, checking out my progress. Fia sat and watched. She didn't even race around the fish-pond-in-a-fountain with the semi-shredded plastic nursery pots she had left littered about the terrace.

She is becoming a fine garden dog.

The last tall bough down, I went and got the electric hedge trimmer and ran it up and down the sides of the yews. One had grown far portlier than the other. I took the pruning shears and removed some of the largest boughs at the edge of the left yew.

Then, Fia and I headed back down to the daylily bed and the 'Daniel Deronda' to take another look back up.

It would do. It's a little bare for now, but new little shoots will push their way out and green it up soon.

After lunch, clean-up time. And despite the damp, I might try to make a burning fire.

If I don't clean up, my husband will step right into the boughs on the steps in the dark, fall and break his neck heading up from his motorcycle. I will hear, PU-tain! And then he won't love what I did so much.

....

Starting again

A Japanese Maple in bud

It was three weeks ago that I took my camera out into the garden to find spring. It was there. Early, but there it was, in the first leaf shoots of the clematis (which reminds me that I have to go out and cut a bunch of them and the honeysuckle down to 30 cm from the ground or get no flowers again this year), the first buds on the grape vines I still haven't planted after nearly 6 years, on the Hortensia that barely survives summer after summer since I put it in 3 years ago down behind the pool and the maples I stuck in the same planting bed, waiting for inspiration to hit me, and the chives sending new blades up, the Bergenia cordifolias' bubble gum pink flowers opening, and the usual appearance of the first crocus and furls of tulip leaves on their masts.

It has been a clement winter since all the snow and cold of December. People returning from their annual ski weeks were grateful that there was still December snow on which to ski, and I have been longing for it to do its job here, which is to hide the ugliness of the garden out of season. I have had no such luck this year, and to make matters worse, I have had a perfectly well-behaved 6-month-old Labrador Retriever, who is a terror out of doors, racing flat-out around the top terrace and after anything that resembles an empty plastic nursery pot, a bedraggled unplanted clematis, or a stick or bit of wood of any description or origin. The yard is strewn with bits of clematis root, bark, and shredded plastic nursery pots in black, dark green, and terracotta.

Did I mention the piles of pooh?

Add the leaves that fell with the last snow that I never raked, the moss invading the grass, and the generally sodden appearance of everything from the nonstop drizzle, and it's an understatement to say that it looks like hell out there, but, today, the sun came out, and I got my camera again. Where I have crossed the top terrace, heading down to the bottom garden for wood for the wood stove or from the gate to the front door or the front door to the dryer and

fridge in the garage, my eyes averted, I went and looked again. I found things to make my heart soar, and things to make me very sad.

One is the weeping rose I tried to save. It is dead and gone. Rotted from the inside out. I don't know what hit it. For years, it was unstoppable in its pageant of magnificence, even giving us a second burst of bunches of tiny pink roses again in late summer, but last summer, it sent up a virtual bouquet of suckers. I would just like you to know that I have never killed a rose bush. Ever. I have looked and looked, and I haven't found quite what happened to its bark. It has to be a sort of blight, a mildew on the trunk itself. It will be hell to dig it up. The lavender plants at its base will have to come out, and then it will be a major undertaking to dig out its tap root to plant another in its place. I had to do this once years ago, when I first began working in the garden. The twin weeping rose over on the other side of the second terrace had died, and my first birthday gift to my husband was a new one, and all the work that went into renovating the lavender and planting it.

My camera battery died just as I noticed the new leaves uncurling themselves on the peony that lives under the spirea bush I never finished pruning. A little late, now that the leaves are coming out, but I am going to have to do it anyway, whatever the cost to the splendor of the spectacle of minuscule white flowers.

I thought about raking. I thought about pruning. I went inside and got my recently arrived copy of John and Emily Visher's How to Win as a Stepfamily and read to the end.

We have already lost. Time to count the fatalities and see what we can manage in the treaty. We refuse to surrender unconditionally.

And then I went and got the outdoor extension cords, my electric hedge trimmer, the long-handled pruning shears and the ladder and climbed up to make a go of pruning the sentinel yews at the top of the stair down into the garden.

My husband has been complaining about these for, oh, three or four or five years, since the last time I pruned them. They have doubled in height, and branches droop under their own weight. They have become a sorry sight. Fia heard the electric trimmer start up and decided indoors was a safer place as branches started to rain down on the bergenia, crocuses and the single delicate narcissus shoot.

Coward.

The electric trimmer wasn't working very well, though, on the thickened vertical branches. I climbed back down the ladder and got the long-handled pruning shears. It was slow and heard-going, holding them out at shoulder height and closing them hard on 1.5 cm thick branches. I heard her whining at the door to come back out now that all was quiet.

A quarter hour went by, about half of one yew was about a meter shorter, and I was exhausted. What was this? I could do anything in the garden in years past, and here I was, wrecked after 15 minutes, in a cold sweat and feeling nauseous. I battled on. If my garden starts to get to me now, I might as well start looking for an apartment. 15 minutes later, it was nearly dark, and I cut the last upright branch. The whole thing tilted toward me, I could see that without getting down from my ladder. In other words, if you took a large sheet of stiff paper and lay it on the top of the pruned yew, the paper would lie at an angle, tilting toward the fish-pond-in-a-former-fountain. I'll fix that tomorrow, when I shape the shrubs.

I turned and attacked the second yew, just to make myself feel better. Tomorrow when I go back out, I'll have a head start, and when my husband gets home from a night delivering our newest niece, followed by a day and a night on duty and a day of normal work at the hospital, he will see one thing checked off my list of things to do in the garden that stretches to infinity and beyond that I have to fit into a demanding schedule of stepfamily reading, drawings to get the trades and my husband and I going to finish up work on the house (inside and out), and my newest responsibility as the volunteer president of an association that runs a daycare center that provides child care for women in job training programs so they can enter the workforce, provide for their families and enjoy the self-esteem that comes with work outside the home.

Oh? I didn't mention that? How forgetful of me.

One day I will remember how to actually work for money, in addition to greater self-esteem, out of sheer necessity.

....