6/2/00 - This has been a week of weeding. As soon as the long rainy period was over, I began to trim, edge, and weed all of the flower beds. As you will remember, I don't mulch the flower beds. Mulching is one way to keep down garden weeds in the springtime, but it also smothers the volunteer seedlings on which I depend in part for summer annuals and a new supply of perennials. But a price must be paid for these "free" flower plants--weeding, which means getting rid of the unwanted weed seedlings as well as the seedlings of flowers of which you already have too many. Part of the problem is to differentiate between the seedlings that you want to preserve and those you want to get rid of. Only experience over time will enable you to save the celosia and balsam seedlings and pull up the white ageratum and other flower and weed seedlings that you don't want. A visiting daughter and granddaughter have made things easier: I have someone to push the lawnmower and help with the trimming. Springtime is the season of burgeoning growth not only of the grass and flowers, but also of the shrubs and bushes. Once the forsythia, dogwood, azaleas, bridal-wreath, mock orange, lilac, flowering almond, etc. have finished blooming, it is time to get your trusty pruning shears to work and reshape your garden shrubbery. It is some time since I have done this on a regular basis, so that this year I had a lot of catching-up to do. Bushes will tend to lean towards the sun, which results in lopsided branches that need to be trimmed to bring the bush back to a properly proportioned display. This afternoon, after a reasonable nine-hole golf score for an old guy, I tackled the trimming of a large flowering bush that was reaching around an oak tree. It looks much better now, and I hope that next spring it will look as lovely as ever. This week's picture is a view of Gertrude's garden taken in late April/early May--azaela and dogwood time. You are looking from the front towards the back of the garden, so that some of the azaleas that you see are in a neighbor's garden. One of the joys of gardening in the same place for many years is seeing small shrubs and flowering bushes reach a lovely maturity. The pink azalea in the right foreground was given to Gertrude as a tiny stick, which the owner of a flower farm gave her with other azaleas she had bought saying, "This is too small to sell; I'll just throw it in with the rest." The pink dogwood to the upper left I planted as a small tree many years ago. Now it reaches out gracefully to escape the shade of the oak tree that towers over it. I will try to alternate pictures of individual flowers (like last week's iris) with wider views of the garden.
