Garden Battles

When the weather improves I am always seized with a need for instant gratification in the garden. Our outdoor wine hours gave me time to study various parts of our mound garden and across from it this bank of streletzias which have gotten completely out of hand. The Buddha was disappearing behind a spreading clump of cana lilies and palms.  I decided we needed to take out one of the palms and all the cana lilies which we cut down once but regrew, and two of the three streletzias. These were on the list for Pedro and his crew to do but I decided we could start cutting down the plants just to see how it would look.

I started cutting the streletzia leaf by leaf. In the course of his chopping of the palm root, John, looking for a sledge hammer, found a far better tool he had forgotten he had...a battery operated mini-chain  saw . It turned out to be the perfect thing to cut through the streletzia stems, like butter. In ten minutes he had cut down as much as it took me three hours to cut down yesterday, while I attempted to put all the stems and leaves in a pile. He even managed to cut down the stump of the palm and dig out the roots.

We'll have to cut down the one on the right tomorrow, but in the meantime, I struggled to thin out the one in the middle and remove all the dead leaves from the center...a much harder job than just cutting down the whole thing...

I went back to my Pilates class in the studio today for the first time in three months. It was the first time since this whole process began that I could begin to tell how much better I could do certain things...like balance...than before I had the surgery.  A good day!