My pruning class, the third meeting.

Warning: I feel cranky and tired right now. I probably should not be blogging. If I say something hateful... I was going to say, "You'll have to forgive me", but of course you don't have to forgive me at all. Most of you don't even know me. Whatever. You might want to come back later and skip this post altogether.

I didn't have to drive all the way to Santa Clara this morning. Which was so nice. I only have one more week of this Saturday class, and then I have a month off before my summer vegetable class begins. I like sleeping in on Saturdays. I miss it.

Anyhow, we worked in Menlo Park today in a really awful garden. Not even a garden. A yard. If last week's theme was fruit trees, this week's theme was renovation. Specifically, how to renovate badly pruned plants.

Perhaps more specifically, and unspoken, how to renovate plants pruned badly by mow & blow crews of Mexican day laborers without any horticulture training whatsoever hired because the clueless homeowners are cheap and just don't care.

Ladies and gentlemen, don't string trim phormium. You'd think that's a no-brainer, but you'd be wrong. I should taken a picture of it. Oh well.

This poor Magnolia x soulangiana will take years to recover. But recover it shall. Teach explained Magnolia are very forgiving of bad prunes.



It thrilled me to watch him de-box this pittosporum.



It made me want a pittosporum of my very own. Not really. I never want a pittosporum. But doesn't it look nice like this? He talked about doing this to escallonia, abelia, and buxus as well.

What is teacher wearing? He said West Marine makes the best rain gear. No need to try anything else. You'll just be wasting money.

We walked down the street and he showed us sad things. Like this. (Tho' the dog shit on the drip line makes it fabulous, doesn't it?)



I feel angry when I see things like this. I was going to say, "In a perfect world, someone would get punished for this." But, really, in a perfect world, this would never happen in the first place. Like I said, I'm cranky and kind of tired. Am I making you cranky too?

Let's just get out of here.

But, wait, one more thing:



See those two tree trunks back there? Those are two separate trees. One is bigleaf maple, the other is coast redwood. They're growing 12 inches apart. Enough said. Let's go.

***

After class, I visited a friend and we went to the Gamble Garden, and then we visited the Woodside Library which has a native plant garden in the back. I'm going to blog them in separate posts so my foul mood here doesn't seep over into those posts too. But first, I'm going to take a little nap or something.

Later!

Last week's class here.