I love my garden in the spring but all of a sudden in July it goes crazy and it scares me. Perhaps it was all those Tarzan movies I watched as a kid - you know the ones with poisonous snakes and quicksand and whatever lurked beneath that loincloth. Anyhow I garden at this time of year with trepidation. It is with a faint heart I wade into shoulder high phlox to trim the climbing rose.
I'm not sure what I fear - mosquitoes, rose thorns, snakes and sickly white borer beetles are all realistic possibilities. I am also afraid that I might step on Mr. Toad who sometimes has a beer with Mr. Nag on the patio. I once cut the leg off a toad when I was doing a bit of trimming. As you can imagine this resulted in hysteria and was perhaps the trigger for my acquired garden phobia. The worst and most delusional fear is that the body of one of the beloved spaniels we buried on the property will somehow rise to the surface and I'll be confronted with terrifying putrefaction.Now you know.
Oh Nag, everyone feels that way. Except for the dead dog bit.
ReplyDeleteWhat do you think is under the loincloth? A dead dog?
ReplyDeleteVery funny!
ReplyDeleteDespite my neurosis I managed to trim the roses, the flowering crab and the tamarisk. I sprayed the roses and planted 3 lilies and a little pine.
ReplyDeleteYou mastered your fear! I love cutting things back. I'm much better at that than helping them grow in the first place.
ReplyDeleteI've developed a couple of phobias over the past few years. My fear of winding European roadways trumps my fear of my own garden.
ReplyDelete