It’s March. The garden is awake and the roses need pruning.
The roses are going to grow whether I prune them or not, of course. Today’s pruning exercise showed up all the places I had missed in the past or where hands other than mine had made their own choices. Hum.. The roses don’t care a jot. They grow. They send out new growth in all directions, reaching for the light, doing their best to get ready to flower. Studies have shown that roses cut with mechanical hedge trimmers do pretty much as well as carefully hand-pruned specimens. I don’t own a hedge trimmer or I might think about it!
Sometimes, nature corrects or adapts our mistakes. Nature just wants to grow. Weeds in the pavement cracks. Buddleia bushes growing out of roof gutters above our heads. Flowers we never planted coming up in the strangest places all over the garden. Thank you birds and wind! They say weeds are ANYTHING growing where we don’t want them to grow. Well, who are we to say? Is a weed still a weed after we notice it has beautiful flowers and the bees adore it?
If they could think and not just grow, I would love to know what the weeds think of us.
EDIT: I have been asked about the secateurs-They are Swiss engineered by the Felco Company and the ones I have, No 6, are designed for smaller hands. They were not cheap but they have been one of the best things I have ever bought for the garden. Make sure you buy their little sharpening file while you are about it. Those two things- smaller secateurs and keeping them sharp, have made all the difference for my compromised wrists and hands in being able to keep gardening.
https://www.worldoffelco.co.uk/
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Quotidian 