crackheads in the garden

After yesterday's rose post, a couple of folks asked why there have been crackheads with weedeaters in the garden. It made me laugh out loud, because why would a reasonably sane couple allow crackheads with power tools access to the beloved garden they've worked on for 15 years?

The fault lies in this perpetually soft heart. If I manage to toughen up for a minute and deny one at the front door, Mike scurries out the back and runs him down, offering a day's work, just to help, you know. As far as how they find us, one of the guys who works for me insists there's some kind of a transmitter hidden on the house and the shop luring them in. We do seem to get more than our share.

So that's why: they come to the door looking for work, always with a desperate story, always with the promise that they learned gardening at grandma's knee, can tell a rose from a weed, a stand of lilies from the poke that runs rampant in the spring, can see the red plastic tape delineating things to be saved from things to be whacked. I have lost countless roses, that irreplaceable stand of pink tiger lilies, peonies, viburnum, great big old lavender and rosemary plants, a rose of sharon and three clematis.

Each year I swear never again. The last crackhead of the last year cut a huge living branch off the ailing river birch, leaving the dried out dead branch I wanted removed still dangerously looming overhead. Not this year, absolutely not, and that's the story. Gotta run, someone's knocking at the front door.