A few weeks ago I was looking forward to the lilac tree in my front yard bursting into color as Spring took hold. I didn’t expect the blooms to be as abundant and as vivid as they were a few Springs ago when it looked like this:
After that magnificent show, the tree hadn’t been pruned back and so last year’s bloom was rather disappointing, and this year, since another year had gone by without the required pruning, all that old growth and little new growth wouldn’t produce a lot of flowers.
The front lawn had turned into a nice field of very healthy dandelions that no amount of uprooting could control, so I called in a gardener to replace the lawn. That would also be a good opportunity to finally get the lilac tree pruned, I thought, although it would mean few lilac flowers this Spring.
My gardening competence ranks about the same as my competence in the kitchen, where it hardly rises above that of unskilled dishwasher, so I asked the gardener to trim off a few of the tips of the branches of the lilac tree. Of course that would have been futile, and my spouse, who is a proponent of severe pruning, gave him other instructions.
This is not the first time my spouse and a gardener of similar persuasion have colluded against me. At a former house, she and the gardener had arranged to prune a little tree in the front yard that I liked, resulting in my coming home to a skeleton of stubby bare branches of what had been a nice bushy tree. Of course I ranted, but I was chastened when the following Spring that skeleton had bloomed into an even lovelier tree than the one I had liked and it continued to thrive until the next pruning, thriving on that one too. And so it went until today it is a very respectable tree. If you look closely enough you can even see it in a Google Earth satellite picture!
My faith and hope were severely challenged last weekend when at first I saw no sign of my lilac after the gardener had left. Some desperate scanning revealed that it was now no taller than the hedge next to it and its few spare branches blended into the surroundings: the electric light pole, the cable supporting the pole, the hedge and the dead and dying shrubs next door.
Gone were the few buds that might have blossomed into flowers. There will be no lilacs at all this Spring in my front yard. My spouse and the gardener assure me there are going to be a lot of them next Spring. They are going to have to put that in writing.
