Heidi's Fascinations

Be calm. Be calm. Deep breath.

Sigh. The 'gardeners' are at my house. They come every Wednesday. And it seems they're intent on wreaking havoc more than usual.

Hold on. I can't take it. I have to go look...

Good lord, they're not gardeners they're mutilators!!! Can't you hear the scream of the plants?

So. At my place I have a sort of patio the size of a small driveway and the owner (not me, unfortunately) planted 4 red trumpet vines to grow on an arbor above the patio. Good idea. Unfortunately, trumpet vines in our area get agressively out of control. Fast. The vines cover the arbor, drape down to the ground, partly cover the ground, cover the roof of the adjacent garage, and had made the leap over to the house and begun covering the roof there. I had the owner out to see it because I'm worried the shingles will be ripped off with their tenacious tentacles. He said he'd think about it.

This Sunday I attacked it. And it looks so much better. It now only covers the patio arbor and the garage roof. There is light coming from between the vine trunks, in other words it isn't a cave now. I trimmed a pick-up truck sized load off. I also trimmed back a poor, poor shrub that had been shaped into a cube for so long...I could hear the screams every time I went out. So I freed it by trimming at different lengths, cutting off all the puny growth at the very edges from gowing/cutting/growing/cutting, and it looks like hell but in a few months will be gorgeous. And a bit more natural. The really sad thing is that the plant grows these gorgeous spikes of pinkish flowers but they could never grow because any new growth was constantly buzz-sawed off.

I know, I know, too much information. Sorry.

So today, I planned on leaving out notes to ask them not to buzz-saw the poor thing. And sure enough they had begun chopping it all back. Ahhhhh! I asked them to just leave it, I liked it natural, and to not buzz it back. He looked at me like "Are you nuts?" Followed by a look that just accepted that fact. I hope he understood the last part about not wacking it flat. I made a hand motion. Maybe that will help. As I walked back, I heard him tell another guy, in the kind of voice that was quite bewildered.

And picture this, you know joshua trees? Well i have something that looks sort of similar. I have a couple gorgeous 25' tall ones. And one of them seeded a baby at its base and I had been nurturing it because they had weed-wacked it. It was looking so happy, at 1.5' tall. They cut it in half! This thing doesn't grow branches from the middles of the spear-shaped leaves! What are they thinking????

And now they're mowing. The grass doesn't need mowed, but I understand that that is their job. Okay. But the wheels and feet just make a mud bog since the grass isn't really growing right now. Sigh.

Thanks for listening.
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