\u201cCome here, Veronica, I want to show you something.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not a plant thing, is it?\u201d<\/p>\n
Busted. I\u2019ve been paying a lot of attention to my yard and my plants. There\u2019s not much else to occupy my time in these times of quarantine.<\/p>\n
We planted all new plants about a year and a half ago, and I\u2019ve been puttering over them and seeing how they will turn out.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m having to pay attention and see what they need from me. We have 7 trees now, 3 fruit trees, 2 shade trees and 2 sculptural trees.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s what the garden designer called them. But this whole time they have just looked like bushes. Compared to the fruit trees, they are not growing very fast.<\/p>\n
When I\u2019ve watched plants grow from seeds, I\u2019ve observed how the plant looks when it\u2019s a baby, the leaves look a certain way. Then when they are only a few days older they change again. There is a whole cycle of what the plants will become throughout their life.<\/p>\n
The sculptural tree are Crape Myrtles, a pink flowering tree that I can see in the neighborhood around me.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve seen these trees, but I have not had a relationship with one. These baby crape myrtles have been with me for a while and they look like bushes. I have been watching what they do and checking them for what they seem to need. They go dormant, which is unusual in my warm climate. They turn dead looking in the winter, which worried me until I realized that this is what they are supposed to do.<\/p>\n
Now is the time that they flower. So Pretty!<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve noticed that they are not really growing up as much as I would have thought. So I asked the internet about it, and I realized that I had to help these trees.<\/p>\n
They want to be trees. I pass these types of trees on my walks and I have examples of how they are at their best. They are lovely, and their trunks and branches arch in a graceful way.<\/p>\n
My trees, which I had mistaken for bushes, had a lot of suckers coming off their main trunk. I trimmed the suckers off, even though some of them were as big as the main trunk of the tree. The thing is, I couldn\u2019t\u2019 recognize what the essence of the tree until it had grown more.<\/p>\n
Ah. And that is what is becoming true about this quarantine. It looked one way at the beginning, but has gone through several changes along the way.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s taking some attention to see what need to be fostered and what needs to be pruned. I can\u2019t stop paying attention for a while.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cCome here, Veronica, I want to show you something.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s not a plant thing, is it?\u201d Busted. I\u2019ve been paying a lot of attention to my yard and my plants. There\u2019s not much else to occupy my time in these … Continue reading