Pruning

This is my favorite season to be outside, and my blogging shows it. I enjoy pruning plants more than any other element of gardening. In springtime the monkey grasses need cut to the ground to make way for new growth, the decorative grasses need the same, the bright yellow forsythia bushes have since turned to green and now is the time to prune them back if I want them to have free, flowing branches rather than a formal bulb of yellow buds next spring. The spirea need the same.

My dianthus need deadheaded, my daisies need cut and brought inside for enjoyment and the baby trees need cut out of bushes and flowerbeds then killed with stump killer before they take over the space.

I didn't have a great interest in gardening as a child or even as a young adult. This desire to prune feels metaphorical as I near forty, wanting to remove the dead, useless stuff from life, and even some of the weaker, good stuff, to make room for the fantastic, to allow the flowering branches to flow naturally in this next season of my life.