Still gardening, a lesson in French

The wisteria comes into blossom

I scared a few people. I said I might never be able to garden again, but I didn't really mean it. I was just sayin', you know, that I was suffering considerably from the intensity of the efforts to clean this garden up. Every year has had its all-consuming tasks, like attacking one particular area of the garden and trying to improve it, sometimes with some success, but more often ultimately disappointing. Live and learn, or garden and learn, has become my motto. You need a thick skin to garden, not only for the rose and Firethorn bushes, but to manage the disappointments when you don't really know what you are doing.

I'll let you in on a secret: some people actually go to school to learn how to design gardens, and others, if they are any good, got a much earlier start than I did at 41 years of age facing a garden gone totally to weed, suckers and overgrowth with no garden budget to speak of.

There was only one real option: DYI.

And, there was only one real "Y": me.

The other "Y" present had been around for a few years before I arrived in Moosesucks, and let's just say that that "Y" had not manifested a considerable energy or resolve faced with the great literary thematic device of Man versus Nature. So, I began "do"ing "it", and aside from the fear that I might possibly have wasted important years of my life to "go down in history" for something (my objective at 25, as I vainly cried into the telephone receiver to my stepfather once, as he far more than kindly and tolerantly listened to my grandiosity, was to be known to History, and it only just occurs to me that this might be my punishment prior to actual death), I did begin to learn, only far, far too slowly given the time gardens take to let you know if you are succeeding.

The other secret: Pain is no excuse not to get out there and finish your work. Neither is the flu.

Yes, we went to Morzine-Avoriaz for a few days of spring skiing last week, and I returned bien grippée. I am, it turns out, a sensitive and delicate creature. My shoulders, thighs and attitude are highly misleading. In the tourist bus that wound its way back down to Annemasse and the highway to the TGV station in Bellegarde, everyone complained of the ventilation.

I refuse, steadfastly, to complain of ventilation, except when it is utterly absent, as in the case of getting in behind the steering wheel and suffocating, which is a sign that my husband, the complainer in the case of air conditioning and ventilation of any sort, including windows left ouvertes once it is no longer anything but stifling hot outside (and even then at night... you never know what will get inside, carried on the non-existent drafts), has been the last to drive the car.

The ventilation system was on full blast.

"Droit dans la gueule," or "right his face", complained my husband, while a few others pulled their sweaters and jackets up to protect themselves from the drafts. "Je commence à avoir mal à la gorge." I feared the worst. It is unpleasant to travel with a mildly infected man. You'd think you need more than a TGV full of pediatrians on their way back from a medical congress.

La gueule is a word you must know if ever you come to France. It refers to the face, more specifically, as in the case of animals, to the mouth (la gueule du chien), and is used in several very important verbs and combined words, such as: gueuler, or "to yell at"; se faire engueuler, or "to be yelled at"; and dégueuler, or "to puke".

The last is, I should think, self-explanatory, given the meaning concerning dogs. Which brings to mind dégueulasse, or "disgusting" (not to be used in polite society, where it is better to stick to dégoûtant(e)).

Gorge is another interesting word in French, given that it refers to the throat, as in mal à la gorge, or sore throat, but it also extends all the way to bust of a woman. Let me explain. The item of feminine lingerie we call a "bra", short for a word that the grandmothers and even the mothers of women of a certain age (mine) knew, "brassière", and pronounced "bra-zeer", is commonly referred to as a soutien gorge, or a soutif for short (not to be used in elegant company, however).

How, I ask, did the French get there, when a brassière had a perfectly understandable meaning, as an item of clothing resembling a camisole with sleeves intended to support the poitrine, or a delicate way of referring to the breasts of a woman by merely referring to the part of the body that begins at the bottom of the neck and extends to the abdomen. We all know what women have there without having to say it. Like the *[redacted], or the part of the body where babies are until they are born, and once conception and implantation have been achieved.

Please go here next, sign and return to this blog. Thank you.

Actually, you'll have to settle for reading this since the http://www.incorporatemyuterus.com site launched by the Florida ACLU seems to be down temporarily. It's probably overwhelmed with visits, even at this early hour in the States. Which makes very very glad to be in France, where it is the same word, and everyone is very comfortable saying it, and where there are a zillion ways to refer to the male member, or the penis.

Did I upset anyone? We can just use the word "verge" (the first "e" being pronounced like "air"; I don't want anyone laughing at you) from now on. Please note that it is feminine, like "bite" (pronounced "beet", and a big no-no in polite society), but unlike "zizi" (pronounced "zee-zee", and perfectly appropriate when talking to young children about this part of the body). In its feminine form, "Zizie" is the name of Titeuf's little sister. Feel better?

Which sort of oddly, or even straightforwardly, given the activities of the insects and the bees and the flowers, as well as, surely, the birds (being far more discreet) at this time, brings me back to the garden with one last word on the ventilation system on the bus. It was while standing on the platform, waiting for the TGV that my gorge began to hurt, and now my poitrine is full of nastiness. Maybe I should start to be concerned about air-born bacteria in bus ventilation systems, or skiing after too much wine and too many late, elaborate dinners.

But, I digress. The soutien gorge is an exceptional case of French modesty in all matters sexual, it supports the "gorge", which in this case does not mean the "throat". No, I joke. The French never feel the necessity for excessive modesty in all things sexual. "Gorge" referred to the breasts in times gone by, as in gorges de miel, or this sublime phrase from Balzac's Lys, written in 1836 (page 25, according to this online dictionary, but I bet the rest is worth reading, too):

Je (...) fus complètement fasciné par une gorge chastement couverte d'une gaze, mais dont les globes azurés et d'une rondeur parfaite étaient douillettement couché dans des flots de dentelle.

I swoon, but I digress.

Ordinarily, I find it wrenching to leave the Alps and put my ski equipment away, but not after spring skiing, when I have work to complete in the garden, and the wisteria is poised to burst into glorious, airy violet bloom. Which is not to be missed. It happens fairly suddenly, and it only lasts a short moment in garden time. It repeats, but very weakly, later in the summer. And, while I was gone, the pink tulips opened.

I apologize in advance for my inability to edit not only my writing, but my photos.

Now, it's time to go out and clip the box hedge along the stairs before I finish the big viburnum and some kind of conifer hedge down in the bottom garden. That is the big job of the moment.

C'mon, Garden Dog and Rapide, on y va.

....

* u-t-e-r-u-s

Garden dog

Fia's sticks

Fia gardens, too. There's nothing I do that Fia can't do, too. Almost nothing; she doesn't drive, for example, and she waits patiently for me to feed her, rather than tearing into the very accessible pet food bags.

Good dog, Fia. Good dog.

She watches me for long stretches of time, stretched out in the shade of whatever tree, shrub or structure is available -- a recent discovery is the unwanted and unfortunate hollow under the big rhododendron I planted a few years back; at least is has a use, even if it represents a failure to plan for settling correctly --, and she learns what gardening involves and decides what parts of it are appropriate for her. It will not be surprising to anyone who knows and loves Labrador Retrievers that with all the pruning I have been doing this month, she had found her use: stick retrieval.

There were piles and piles of sticks that she watched me carry laboriously down to the burning pile, and she considered this. Sticks. Carrying. Sticks... carrying...

"I can do that!"

She didn't say it. I heard her think it.

And then I saw the consequence of her realization: sticks everywhere. Garden Dog was picking up the sticks out of my piles as a dog can, in her mouth, and carrying them up to the top terrace lawn, while I went on with my Edward Scissorhands imitation, cutting, cutting, cutting and making ever bigger piles of sticks that Fia busily diminished according to her abilities.

Naturally, given what one Labrador Retriever can carry in her mouth, I didn't notice until I staggered up the stairs to get a glass of water and found sticks littering the lawn, all the way from the stop of the stairs, along by the fish-pond-in-the-old-fountain, on to the steps to the French door and then strewn around the terracotta tile floor. Some were shredded, like McDonald's lettuce, only with more fiber.

Rapide's bed is full of shredded sticks at all times. Like having potato chip crumbs in your bed.

Thanks for the hand, Fia.

....

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.

....

Luck o' the Irish in France: An accidental St. Patrick's Day

Fia meets Flaque

Or the 1/8th Irish, to be exact.

Garden Dog and I took a break from the garden yesterday to go pay a visit to Garden Dog's little cousin, Flaque, in Viroflay. I knew it was Saint Patrick's Day, but it had slipped my mind until we passed the hospital on the way to the highway, and I mentally reviewed my outfit. Blue and gray and brown. Not a trace of green anywhere.

It's no big deal, said myself. Look around. No one's wearing green. It's not even that nice a color to wear, and it doesn't suit you. Besides, no one here even realizes it's the traditional day to put green food coloring in your beer and drink until you throw-up all over Fifth Avenue.

It was a consoling thought. Never mind that Mayor Bloomberg got in trouble for having a similar one. Nonetheless, I have only seen more very drunk people -- well, nowhere. Not even at a Fiji house party, where most of the beer was soaking into the floor and gluing us in place. I shudder, and it was a long time ago.

"But, what about the bretons? Do you think they are feeling any particular kinship toward Saint Patrick and the Irish in the Finistère?"

Myself was a little puzzled. We thought about it all the way to the highway, and then we forgot all about it following a very low truck. We had already left late and would never make it home at a

reasonable time to prepare dinner. I fretted and considered doing a U-turn, but I hate wasting a quarter of an hour, driving to the highway, only to turn back home. Besides, Flaque had been in Viroflay for 2 1/2 months, and Fia still hadn't met her cousine germaine.

That's "first cousin" in French.

Half an hour later, we pulled up in front of the gate and pushed it open. Fia knew where she was, but -- there was something new. She looked at me, and yanked me after her on the other end of her leash over the railroad ties and practically headfirst into the bushes. She sniffed. She raised her head and looked around, and then plunged her snout back into the dirt. Spinning around toward me, she got tangled in her leash and flashed me a look of incomprehension, C'est quoi ça que je sens? Mais! C'est quoi alors?

Oh, Fia. I knew, but how to tell her. It was why, in part, we had come.

"Tu vas voir, ma good dog, tu vas voir. Allez, viens."

It was a long trip to the back of the house, with Fia stopping to press her snout to the ground and tremble every few centimeters, but we made it. Marguerite and her friend were having goûter, and she flew to her feet when she saw Fia. I slid the glass door open and followed Fia into the kitchen, where she ran smaque into Flaque and ran straight for cover at Clémence's knees.

Mais quel courage! A 7 1/2-month-old, 24 kg Black Labrador cowering at the knees of a teenage girl, seeking protection from a 4 1/2-month-old Black Labrador about half her side. Now you know what Rapide suffers.

Daily.

We pushed them out the door and into the rear garden, Marguerite, Clémence, my belle-soeur and I right on their tails, where Fia would have all the room she needed -- to run and hide under a bush.

Mais QUEL courage.

It took a few minutes for Fia to recover from her shock and discover the joys of a little cousin, who will soon be a grown-up Lab just like she will be in a few months, and when 3 months will mean nothing, and they will be the very best of first cousins and friends.

But, it wasn't only to make the introduction of Flaque to Fia that we had come to Viroflay. The belle-soeurs had important belle-soeur things to discuss.

"Thé ou un jus de fruit?" she asked. "Pour toi, c'est un thé, non?"

"Oui, plutôt un thé," I said.

"Un peu du gâteau?" she offered. "C'est un gâteau de l'amitié, fait avec de la vrai levure."

"Tu sais, je mange pas vraiment cela," I reminded her, wondering why I had gone and done that. It smelled like heaven. Like beer and fruit and nuts. I nibbled a corner of the piece she had set on the counter for me and reached for the mug she had pulled down from the cabinet.

"Regards ce que j'ai pour toi," she said, handing it to me. I had seen it before. It was covered with brightly colored sheep and words. She held it so the word "crazy" faced me. I laughed. If belle-soeur conversations had titles, that would have been a good one for the sujet du jour.

I poured tea into the mug and looked more closely at the sheep on the inside of the mug. The green was not just green; it was shamrocks, and it said "Ireland" next to it. I could scarcely believe it.

"Mais! Tu sais ce que c'est aujourd'hui? I asked, certain she didn't.

"Non."

"C'est le Saint Patrick!"

"Non!" I scrutinized her. She seemed genuinely surprised, but she is a master of dry humor. I could be wrong. I preferred to think she did not know.

"Oui."

Happy Saint Patrick's Day, after all, and Erin go Bragh!

....

If a photo is a thousand words, a better photo is 12 megawords

Fia, in her glory

Not all things that are stunningly beautiful and wonderful in the garden are flowers and leaves opening, or plants surviving my poor care. There is my dog, and there is my Nikon D300 and Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 lens with which to shoot all things great and small for posterity.

I prefer shooting with a camera. There's no blood.

This particular shot was a huge stroke of luck, outside of Fia simply being lovely. I was failing trying to get the light exposure right on Shadow, who was being unusually cooperative, but usually vocal, when I heard a noise, turned to look and focused as fast as my right hand would let me and still get the photograph. I was shooting with this old, but superb, Nikon lens, which is another of the manifold reasons to use Nikon equipment. This lens dates from the early 1980's, and because no one, according to Ken Rockwell, shoots with 50mm lenses anymore, I got it pretty cheap, and I can use it on my D300 is from 2007, where it behaves more like a 75mm lens on this APS-C DSLR camera.

This is where my eyes start to glaze over. I got that information from Photozone's review/lab test report of the lens. Ken Rockwell reviews the AI version, but only the E-Series for the Ai-S.

Reading Ken Rockwell has me shopping eBay for lenses again. Please do not tell my husband. He thinks one lens is enough, like the AF-S Nikkor 18-200mm f3.5-5.6 VR lens that came with the D300 he gave me for Christmas. It is absolutely marvelous. I absolutely do love it. It is absolutely enormously convenient, but here is what Ken Rockwell has to say about it.

I feel foolish. My husband is right. It looks like I only need one lens now (until I can afford a 12-24 f/4 AF-S DX, or the more recent 10-24mm). And to learn to use my D300 fully.

I'm still not selling my other lenses.

Every day, I go out into the garden with my camera and look for what is new. A bud that might have bloomed, a plant that is still not dead, and I take photos of it all. I can do it forever, and I practically do. I am going to wear my camera out. I must say that I do wonder what exactly the point is. What good do these photographs do? What use will I make of them? What use will anyone make of them? I love them for the fact that they can be.

My husband asked the other night at dinner if we had sold the other camera yet. It was going to be a delicate subject. There was the D300 I had bought for myself, and there was the one he gave me for Christmas, and there is the Canon EOS Rebel XTi I had bought used and given Sam for his birthday a couple of years ago. That was the camera to sell. We had talked about it before, but my husband's memory is as bad for most things as mine is for others. Notably, anything having to do with money, but I refuse to appear to be unkind or ungrateful. It's my son who is the photographer in the making, not I, and yet it is I who have the better camera. It's all a question of timing.

When we gave him his camera, he was hoping to become a photographer in the making, and I was still using the Fuji FinePix 3800 my mother had given me to take better pictures than I was sending digitally, taken with an Aiptek 8 years ago. Those images understandably frustrated everyone. On screen, they looked like film photos taken in 1926. He had done a lot of research and found this camera, used, in Versailles, at a great price in the price range we could swallow. All was good.

Then, I saw what he could do with his camera in the garden, and I started to feel restless. Last fall, I began to research cameras. I'd get a Nikon, that much I knew, since I had a FE and 3 great Nikkor lenses. There was the D90, and then there was the D300. I could get the camera body alone for about the D90 with a lens, and I would have a lot more camera for the money. I could use my old lenses until I felt I had paid enough dues to get a great lens for it. I would also have a camera considered professional, meaning that it is the lowest priced camera to qualify under the Getty rules for publishing.

Not that this really meant anything for me. This does not count as publishing.

That was when my husband started to think about the same thing for me. For years, anytime we went anywhere, he walked ahead, while I dragged along, taking photographs of everything, from door hinges to domes. One weekend, I managed 500 or 600 photos in Prague. From his point of view, we had hit a new low in quality couple time. The next trip, I left the camera home, and he didn't even notice. I had to point it out to him. To be fair, it is only what he expects when he makes the effort to go someplace with his wife: her company, and not the company of her camera as an unwelcome third. When he got me my D300, it appeared that it seemed normal to him that Sam had one, as he thought he did, not realizing that that D300 was mine, since he didn't know Sam had finally taken his Canon to Paris.

This was when we should have realized he was basically giving up on the law.

It did not now appear so normal, it seemed, but these are the heated discussions in which parents find themselves engaged with the passion with which they also (one hopes) love.

"Il n'a pas besoin d'un appareil de photo professionnel," said he, predictably, and feeling pretty sure he'd won. What argument could I give to justify a first year university student in a program of legal studies needing a professional quality camera?

"Mais," -- this is always a good way to start a rebuttal -- "il y a des photos qu'on ne peut même pas prendre avec un appareil moins bien," I countered.

Not that this was necessarily true from a Canon EOS Rebel XTi to a Nikon D300. What was true is that you can see the difference in the quality of the photographs they take, and if you care a lot about that, then it makes a really big difference. Once you can get an image of that quality, it's awfully hard to accept less. In fact, you want more still, even for your not yet professional photographer son, but as much as I wanted to win this, I also wanted my husband to think sweetly of me. I would have to put my foot down and whine convincingly, making the same argument over and over until he essentially gave up, also preferring to think sweet thoughts of his wife. I think this has something to do with his daughter.

I have been especially sweet of late.

"Ben, d'accord," he relented, "mais je pense qu'il devrait au moins nous donner ce qu'il reçoit pour le Canon."

This was actually pretty fair, but I wanted him to be able to get a lens, and he had done some research and found one that would make him happy for his uses that was only about 130 euros.

"Oui, la différence entre le prix de l'appareil de photo et l'objectif qu'il veut pour le D300. Il n'est pas très cher."

He gave up. This is what Sam and I do, and what we share, other than skiing and loving our dogs. We take photographs. We even do it together. And we show one another our photographs. It's a sort of language to talk about the way we see the world and what we notice. A way to know one another that a life without cameras would not allow us, unless we drew, or painted, or talked endlessly. Seeing what makes him take a photograph tells me what moves him, from a blue Birkin bag perfectly matched with dress and shoes to rapture on a cupid's stone face, and the better the equipment, the finer the result, the more powerful is our speech.

It's like suddenly having full possession of a language, with its full vocabulary and grammar.

It's like playing or listening to a fine violin after a scratchy elementary school beginner instrument. There is no going back when you can hear the difference, but I can understand the question of means.

For me, it's a little more monotonous, ranging from my dogs a million times to my flowers a billion times. Each year.

....

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.

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