Is there a term for doing too much pruning? Not over-pruning, you understand, but a word or phrase suggesting that you have pruned a lot of things and, though you’re sick to the back of your secateurs with doing pruning, you’ve still got more pruning to do?
“Hacked off”, perhaps? “In a snip”? “Cut up”?
Whatever it is, I am certainly feeling it after pruning some 20 hydrangeas and at least that many roses, with more roses – two of them spiky climbers – to come.
For me, late winter is a time of panic in the garden. With the flowering of our daffodils, erlicheer and grape hyacinths comes the certainty of spring, but also the anxiety that if I don’t pull finger and start pruning everything in sight then I will be letting the garden down.
This is a novel feeling for me. Before we came to Lush Places, our gardens were almost entirely none of my business. I mowed the lawns, trimmed hedges, dug the odd hole and left the rest to Michele, who did all the planning and planting and pruning. She’s the gardener.
As far as I was concerned, our garden was a place to sit in on a summer’s day with a beer or book, not something I had to get involved with.
However, each of those city gardens was like a well-behaved child. They might occasionally play up and even run Michele a bit ragged, but it didn’t take much more than a stern word from her to get them back in order and minding their Ps and Qs.
The garden, or should I say gardens, at Lush Places aren’t nearly so obliging, and keeping the buggers in some sort of order is a two-person job at least.
However, as I’ve become more involved, and literally more hands-on in the garden, I have begun to suspect that me and the missus have differing gardening philosophies.
Simply put, my credo is that if I start something in the garden (or anywhere, really), it needs to be finished the same day. And if can’t be completed the same day due to, say, it being a big job or the arrival of a frigid southerly, then it should be completed as soon as humanly possible.
Michele, I’ve begun to suspect, has a much more relaxed approach. This observation is mainly due to her recently taking a week to finish planting three small deutzia in the tiny patch of dirt below the kitchen window. Not that it mattered that it took a week, of course. At least not to Michele or the deutzia.
The trouble was, and for reasons I can’t quite explain, I felt strangely anxious the job hadn’t been finished. What’s that about? Not the deutzia.
I have the same anxiety about the pruning, big job though it is, and the hedges and trees that need tidying up before spring, too.
The only cure, I suppose, is to get out in the garden and get on with it.
As the days grow longer, the wait for the remaining three hens of the apocalypse to start laying again grows longer still.
Whereas our friend Pru boasted over yum cha last weekend that her chooks are already laying so many eggs she doesn’t know what to do with them all, the Lush Places layabouts haven’t produced a single, solitary egg for at least six months. A new brood is required, we have decided, and soonish.
Which leaves the open question of what to do about Catherine, Joanna and the ex-Prime Minister, whose single contribution at the moment is crapping on the doorstep.
One solution is King Charlie. At least he might have been. Our sovereign majesty has decided to give New Zealand a miss when he travels Downunder in October, so we won’t have a chance to petition him.
The King, you see, keeps his own posh chooks at Highgrove, but recently took on a poor, deserving working-class one, an unwanted commercial hen for the chop because she was past her laying peak.
What a pity his nibs is not popping in here – we have three more members of the hoi polloi available for looking down on.
