I've spent several recent afternoons this past week in London Grove Township, cleaning up a friend's long-neglected garden. This has involved pulling down grapevines that had climbed three stories high into the trees, uprooting dead shrubs, carefully clearing out pricker bushes (with my trusty old Smith & Hawken leather rose gauntlets), and gleefully destroying thick, hairy poison ivy vines that had actually worked their way inside the house's siding.
Yes, OK: I have some scratched legs and I've managed to contract a little bit of itchy poison ivy rash. But it's a small price to pay for the intellectual satisfaction of restoring order to an old garden. I've found swaths of long-forgotten daffodils and periwinkle hidden under the dead vines. And it is serious fun doing battle with grapevines so thick and enmeshed in the trees that I could use them for TRX suspension training.
I've loved every minute, as I knew I would. In fact, I volunteered for the task as soon as I saw the overgrown garden. The garden's owner is baffled by this. He wasn't aware that a few summers ago, on what turned out to be the hottest day of the year, I drove all the way out to Carlisle just to work on a friend's mother's garden (I got to uncover an old brick sidewalk!).
Come to think of it, that garden owner was pretty baffled too.
