The Garden: burstng forth

I'm not here today with any great insight or wisdom to share. Instead, it's just a day to honor our little backyard gardens.

We have had a great deal of rain over the last ten days or so, and the results have been spectacular. Of course, the garden has no idea which plants we wish to encourage and which we assign the dreaded W word to--you vile weeds know the W word I'm talking about, as it starts with W and ends with -eeds--so we had amazing growth among the plants which are not allowed in the garden.

No, I don't understand why they can't read and heed the signs.

Julia and I were sitting on the patio enjoying the cool breeze and the freshly trimmed lawn (I had just finished mowing for the third time in the last 10 days) when I noticed a couple of tall plants in the corner garden which I was fairly certain did not belong.

I was a little tired from the already-completed chores, but I thought it would be nice to rid that area of the tall weeds, and I asked Julia to confirm their weed status. She threatened to kill me if I mistakenly pulled any delphinium (no need--had I pulled any, I would have sacrificed myself, falling on my upturned garden spade, for the sheer magnitude of the sin), and moved purposefully over to that area of the yard.

Here's the thing: I was planning to pull a couple of tall weeds which were interfering with our view of that portion of our gardens simply as a symbolic show of good intent.

You can guess what happened.

We spent the next good bit of time pulling all kinds of those obnoxious delphinia-imitators (they really do look a lot like the real thing, and they grow snuggled up right next to the real delphinia just to piss me off) from more than one area of our gardens.

I made two runs with the garbage can full of trashed weeds out to our composting bin by the time we were done.

My lesson learned was to never offer any sort of symbolic gesture when it comes to garden maintenance. In IT project parlance, there is a high risk of scope creep. I was glad when we finished to see the progress, and that was probably the lesson I was meant to learn.

Interspersed in my griping are a few shots I took in the garden yesterday. My favorite is the clematis (immediately above this paragraph) which finally has taken off and come to love its spot in the shelter of the big pine tree we planted ten years ago. When the sun begins to beat down unrelentingly in a few weeks, the clematis will still have the tree's branches shading it from the afternoon heat.

On a side note, today is the day of my JJL post for this month, a month when we are discussing our progress toward completion of our 2009 goals, given that the end of this month will mark the halfway point of the year. Check it out! The discussions are typically quite informative as everyone brings their own unique view to the table.