Pruning

I am not a trained gardener. I have no skills to speak of and I'm usually pretty giddy when my plants don't die. I have great gardening heritage, though. Both my grandmothers kept beautiful gardens and could make just about anything blossom. I sometimes lean on that heritage and go with my gut. I throw seed in random places. I mix things willy-nilly. I rip up stuff I don’t like. As our yard currently shows, Chance doesn’t generally turn out very good results.

Stan's mom is also a fabulous gardener. Unlike me, Stan learned how to garden. He knows the right things to do to keep our plants in good shape long term. He understands which plants will fare will in our space. And what he doesn't already know he's patient enough to research. That's probably the biggest difference right there: patience. I want to go out and make beauty happen; Stan wants to cultivate it. Most of what looks good in our yard is a result of Stan’s hard work.

This week Chance did a little extra work in our yard. I walked out to the backyard this morning and found an extra bush blocking my path. On closer examination, it turned out to be a very large, very leafy tree branch. We’ve had some wind gusts and apparently one was big enough to take down a healthy limb from our tree. It’s a robust tree so losing one limb isn’t likely to have an impact, and the limb missed the house. So far, it’s a pretty neutral affair.

I had trouble moving the big bushy thing and realized that the fallen limb had gotten entangled with the rhododendron. Uh oh. The rhododendron is not our healthiest bush. It’s gotten bashed by fallen branches a few times and has struggled to come back. I’m rooting hard for the little darling so I was quite concerned. I reached in to gently pry fallen limb from the bush and found two newly broken rhododendron branches. Both branches were previously hit and had been struggling to regain life. Previously they seemed to be winning the slow battle so I wasn’t willing to prune them, even though I knew I should. Here, in one swift move, Chance did the pruning I couldn’t bring myself to do.

Our yard has a smaller, but much healthier rhododendron and I have another reason to continue my haphazard gardening ways. I’m going to really enjoy those blooms.