Bushes and beauty

Posted by Mark Chapman on July 23rd, 2010 at 11:52 am

Herb “Padre” Agee

By Herb “Padre” Agee

Engle­wood United Methodist Church

Last week, when I talked about exer­cis­ing by work­ing in the yard, a friend responded to my story by ask­ing, “Pick-ax, huh. .. How tough is your yard?” I sent her a newslet­ter arti­cle I had writ­ten on Tues­day, Aug.  30, 2005. It explains a lit­tle bit about my yard. Here it is:

We have got­ten the house unpacked and together enough that Candy wants to start on the yard. She loves beauty and needs to have it around her. Evi­dently I don’t quite ful­fill that beauty need enough myself, so the only solu­tion is to cre­ate some. I, per­son­ally, don’t seem to have the same need for beau­ti­ful bushes and shrubs.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, I love walk­ing through com­mer­cial gar­dens or look­ing at some­one else’s beau­ti­ful yard. The prob­lem is, I am a man, and we seem to have some sort of x-ray vision when it comes to beau­ti­ful land­scap­ing. We have the uncanny abil­ity to see right through the beauty to the amount of work it took to make it happen.

Let me stop here to explain: I real­ize God cre­ates the beauty, but some­how I seem to always get stuck with the grunt work.

Take a gor­geous bush, for exam­ple. That didn’t just pop up out of the ground like magic. There was either an empty spot on the ground, or, worse yet, an old, ugly bush tak­ing up that space. To cre­ate beauty in that place involves first dig­ging up the old bush, and please let me explain how that goes — “not too good” (for you Hoyt and Del­bert fans).

When you first try to put your shovel in the ground, you find that some­one in the past his­tory of this yard thought it would be a good thing to put down four to six inches of dec­o­ra­tive rock. This, at least in my opin­ion, is not a good thing. Dig­ging through rock is what John Henry did with his ham­mer, for those of you who remem­ber the old song. Shov­els are not made for that, but it’s the only thing I have (I’ve never, before now, found the need to own a pick or jackhammer).

So, using the shovel, you dig through the rock. Once you get to dirt, you feel con­fi­dent this will go much bet­ter. That feel­ing lasts about two inches, until you hit a root. Now, small roots from the bush itself are not really a prob­lem for a sharp shovel. The key word here is sharp. Did I men­tion about dig­ging through four inches of rock? Did you ever play “Rock, Paper, Scis­sors?” If I remem­ber cor­rectly, rock beats scis­sors. For future ref­er­ence, rock beats shovel, too. But I’m ram­bling now.

What you thought was a small root from the bush turns out to be a huge root from a tree in the woods that is 20 feet away. I do own a chop­ping tool, but it seems to be way more effec­tive on feet than on roots (but that’s another story). After cut­ting out enough roots to start a small bon­fire, you have a hole big enough for the bush.

Now you have to pull the bush from the plas­tic pot in which it has grown for the last year or so. I’m guess­ing at this time period because the roots have not only grown through the lit­tle holes in the bot­tom and inter­twined them­selves, but some­how the plant has chem­i­cally bonded with the plas­tic, mak­ing it vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to pull apart (I don’t under­stand how this hap­pens, but nei­ther chem­istry nor botany were my major in seminary).

So get­ting the plant out now requires another cut­ting tool, a razor knife, which moves the dan­ger of injury from the feet to the hands. A “razor knife” — two sharp and dan­ger­ous ideas com­bined. Who thought of this? By the way, it really hurts to scrub the dirt out of a nasty cut, and never show such a cut to your “doc­tor” wife who knows all about infec­tions. Did you know that Band-Aids now come in dec­o­ra­tor col­ors? Again, I ramble.

With the bush now cut free from the pot and all wounds cleaned and ban­daged, you can actu­ally “plant” the bush, which was the intent two hours ago when you began. It’s beau­ti­ful! This remark­able process now fills you with a great sense of accom­plish­ment until you real­ize that there are four more bushes to get in the ground.

Isn’t a beau­ti­ful yard a won­der­ful thing?

Who­ever said, “Beauty is only skin deep” never did any landscaping.

You can comment on this story below.

If you want to link to this post from your site, use this trackback link.

One response to “Bushes and beauty”

1. Mary Ann Leonard

   7 / 31 / 2010
   10:55 am

   Another good one,Herbie !!Take care off to read the next one.God Bless !

Leave a reply:

You must be logged in to post a comment.