The gardener across the road enquires after my heath. "They don't call them operations any more," he says. "They call them 'procedures'".
Have you noticed how animals, people, objects arrange themselves in fields as you pass in the train? Three crows in a diagonal line; or one crow who thinks he's god; a group of cows all pointing the same way in one corner, the rest of the field empty; a pod of sheep; one man and a dog like a yo-yo running off and coming back.
Last autumn, being a little incapacitated, I crudely amputated the shoots of a climbing rose rather that tying them to the wall as I should have done. Now my brutality is rewarded by more deep crimson, heavily scented roses than ever before. And you can almost see the branches making up for lost time, as they push towards the sky.
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Many plants seem to like harsh treatment; we pulled up some small lilac trees which hadn't been thriving and tossed them on the rubbish heap where they stayed all winter. In the spring they started to bud and we repented and replanted them, from which time they have groen and flowered beautifully!
Sometimes we have to be cruel to be kind!
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