Wife on cutting edge of pruning
I should know better by now. After spending a quiet afternoon visiting my mother, imagine how I felt when I returned home to see a rhododendron bush in our yard sitting where there was none before I left.
In fact, it was located right in front of another rhododendron, one with which I am familiar.
Something wasn’t quite right.
Within a few moments, I realized the mystery shrub was not planted in the yard but had fallen victim to the Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
The chain saw in this case was my lovely wife.
She was at it again. She had slain and dismembered a shrub that had graced one corner of our tiny front yard. Completely cut down to its root, the bush lay in pieces, ready for me to gather them up and put them on the curb for pickup.
It was a familiar circumstance, one that has been the source of a continuing disagreement between my wife and I since almost the day we wed.
My lovely wife has a penchant for trimming everything in sight, whether it needs it or not, in my opinion.
I proffer “in my opinion” because she claims if it were left to me, all the greenery around our home would soon mask its very presence, much like what the tropical forests did to stone buildings left behind by the ancient Incas, Mayans, etc.
Why should that bother me? Most men would think, “Well, at least I don’t have to do it.”
That’s not the point. I like trees, plants and shrubs and am inclined to let them grow as nature intended. Not being horticulturally-inclined by nature, I suppose I would eventually cut a limb, branch or stem or two if they seemed to get in my way, for instance, when I am cutting grass. But even now, I bend, brush aside, stoop and crawl sometimes around and under our landscape plants rather than cut them back.
To the contrary, my wife has no trouble dismembering every tree, shrub, bush and plant in sight.
Her excuse (she calls it a reason) for removing the rhododendron?
“It was scraggly and unhealthy. Now it can grow back in a more manageable way. Plants need that. They like to be trimmed,” she said.
Heaven forbid if I ever become scraggly or unhealthy looking. I’m liable to get the trim of my life.
In years past, after she went on a cutting rampage, I would hide her implement of choice. Somehow she would locate another with which to do her paring.
On her last venture into slicing and dicing she extolled the virtues of a pruning saw I purchased several years ago.
Now I have to make it disappear.
It’s a shame, too.
Of course, you may wonder why we own two sets of hand clippers, a hedge cutter (hand and electric-powered), a bow saw, pruning saw, a pruning saw on a pole for reaching above our heads, etc.
It’s because I hid some of them so well after my wife’s foray into plant dissection I can’t find them and had to buy new ones.
You may well ask, “Why buy new clippers/cutters if your are so opposed to her lopping down the shrubs?”
Good question.
Well, the answer is, I have to have something to write about, don’t I?
Have a good day.
James Pletcher Jr. is Herald-Standard business editor. He can be reached at 724-439-7571 or by e-mail at jpletcher@heraldstandard.com
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