I love to prune. While other people enjoy mowing their lawns, planting bulbs, and plotting the placement of their flowering annuals, I yearn for a sharp pair of pruning shears. It's terribly refreshing to clip old twigs off my grapevines, or attack my numerous rosebushes, dreaming of the flowers they will soon produce. Having a yard of my own is the culmination of years of wishing I knew the art of bonsai. Now I practice my own brand of bonsai: taming and shaping a yard instead of a tiny potted juniper.
My late father loved his chain saw, which enabled him to prune with abandon, and on an even larger scale than I can accomplish with pruning shears. I remember when Dad first attacked the yard of my childhood home. He cut back bushes along our property line next to the vacant lot. The owner of that lot then decided it looked big enough to move a little house in there (which he did).
Dad took down the ancient, non-producing apricot tree in the side yard. He ripped into the towering silver birch in the front yard, and he took out the blue spruce in the back. That opened up the yard and let in more light to our home. And the spider count inside the house dropped drastically, too.
As a child, I felt sad at some of the pruning my Dad undertook. Removing the bushes and spruce tree made the backyard open and less private. Of course the neighbor moved that little house next door, which didn't help. There were fewer leaves to rake into a huge pile and jump into in the fall without the birch tree out front. But the absence of the birch tree enabled me to see, unobstructed, the bright Christmas star on top of the grain silo across town from my second-story bedroom window. A fine trade indeed. And birch leaves are small anyway; we had plenty of maple leaves left to enjoy.
As a grown-up homeowner, I appreciate the many reasons my Dad pruned around my childhood home. The biggest reason, which is just as delightful as the sheer excitement of pruning, is that THERE ARE NOW FEWER PLANTS TO TAKE CARE OF. In pruning the whole yard, my Dad eliminated hours and hours of yard work per year.
Multiply that number by the 30+ years since his first chain saw rampage, and that's a tremendous amount of time and personal energy he saved for himself and my mother over a lifetime of home ownership.
Decluttering your yard is more that just raking leaves and sweeping up pine needles: It's deciding if removing particularly high-maintenance plants would be a better way of cleaning up your yard, permanently, freeing up hours of your LIFE in the process.
During this budding spring season, please consider the areas of your yard that could use a good pruning. Ripping out that miserable-looking shrub, or digging up the non-producing butterfly bush will open up space and leave more room for the plants you love.
Go ahead. Call the arborist to come remove that aging pine tree in your backyard, which has dropped sharp little brown needles and cones all over your lawn for decades. Call the wrecking yard to haul away the '78 Chevy sitting broken and forlorn, dripping oil in the driveway, which you have to clean up every few months. You don't need that stuff taking up your life. Get out your pruning shears! What a great sense of relief and openness you will feel!
