Let Go and Let God

I've been working diligently to save these bushes. We started yard work here eight years ago. I distinguish yard work from gardening. In my head, yard work is fixing or maintaining growing things. Gardening is picking and planting growing things. The yard work started long before the gardening.

Most of the yard work was done with a chain saw. We cut down dead trees, then dead bushes, then worked on grooming the stuff worth saving. These bushes along the shed seemed like they were worth saving. I read up on trimming bushes, and I learned that you can cut one third of the bush off every year before it blooms to get it back down to a smaller size. For two or three years, I learned that spring comes and passes faster than you expect.

But last year, I knew when I needed to take action. We got out in the yard and started cutting. To cut off one third, it required a cut that was above my head, so Mark cut and I dragged to the street. We filled the front of our yard along the road with branches. We eventually ran out of spring and energy, but through the summer, we went ahead and cut right to the ground the bushes we decided were so bad, they weren't worth saving. They looked like the best trimming in the world would never produce a well shaped bush.

This year we cut off another third. I spent a good deal of time watching them grow this spring. Up top, near the cuts, fills in first, making a weird, top-heavy bush. But slowly, the green fills in toward the ground. During one of my daily bush checkings, I notice this:


These beautiful bushes are popping out of the stumps left after hacking these bushes to the ground. I had wondered how I'd every get the dead, lifeless, useless stumps out of the ground. I guess they had other plans.