Back to basics

This morning I noticed that some of the vines behind the gazebo were daring to creep over the common wall again, and decided I'd better clip them back in order to avoid any HOA complaints. What I thought would take a few minutes escalated into a major pruning job.

First, I decided to prune back the lilac vine (Hardenbergia) rather severely because it was looking pretty shabby this year. There were very few blossoms, and most of the new growth was on the top of the trellis.
That done, I moved on to the next trellis, which was overgrown with Hall's honeysuckle and had a lot of dead material showing underneath. I hadn't even planted Hall's honeysuckle on this trellis....it wandered there from another location and looked rather nice last year, so true to my "Akuna Matata" gardening style, I let it stay.

That was a mistake, Hall's honeysuckle is rather invasive making it exactly the wrong kind of plant to have on the HOA common wall, although it works well on the wall where I originally planted it. So I cut it back to confine it to its original location, and excised its wandering tentacles from this trellis. Much to my surprise, I found new growth on a snail vine planted at its base. The snail vine is a better choice for this location, and should do much better now that it is no longer being suffocated by the more aggressive honeysuckle.

As I often do when working in the garden, I thought about how what I was doing applies to life. Sometimes our lives become overgrown with activities that, although attractive and good in their proper places, crowd out or hide other things that are perhaps better or more desirable. Sometimes organizations become so constrained by a tangle of competing values and goals that they can't effectively accomplish the tasks they were created to perform. I think sometimes cutting everything back to the roots is healthy and invigorating. And sometimes you will be surprised by what you find!