pruning

If I didn’t like poetry, and liked pruning, I might compare poetry and pruning, but as it is, pruning seems to involve a battle resulting in the sudden, violent death of very large entities. Perhaps it is like poetry after all.

“Topiaries,” Catherine Daly

This piece feels like a stumbling block. I want to find reasons not to like it. It is leading me to write in some very boring vein, which I don’t know how to avoid. It starts with a paragraph that doesn’t make sense to me. I also feel guilty about killing somewhat large entities in my yard. Uprooting an azalea bush just this afternoon, as part of spring cleaning, and next week, planning to cut down two overgrown fir trees flanking my front door.

One paragraph in this piece seems necessary:

The workers, with less work to do, must make their jobs necessary to keep them. They overprune the existing plants. After a year or so of overpruning, a plant dies. The workers then replace it with a new plant and begin the process again.

Social and economic context is useful.

Also – pruning aside, why would 11,000 people want to live in a gated rental community in the desert? Sounds like a bad idea.

We watched “The Garden” last week, a documentary about the South Central Farmers and their 14-acre urban garden. It was destroyed by bulldozers and shows as bare dirt in Google maps. The farmers moved their gardening elsewhere (Bakersfield).

View S Alameda St & E 41st St in a larger map

Do you have a healthy relationship with plants? Have you killed any lately?