What I finally learned about pruning roses. (They need not dread my approach anymore.)
First:
- God is a gardener. You’re reading through Genesis Chapter 2, and there it is: The Lord God planted a garden. One assumes that, since He planted it, He tended it. Tending means pruning. Pruning means you better know what you’re doing.
Which brings to mind a Environmental Horticulture class I took fresh out of high school at the local junior college. The instructor was an energetic young man with a great deal of enthusiasm for his subject. One early winter afternoon he took us for a walk around campus for a pruning clinic, reducing those defenseless bushes to an array of sticks in nothing flat.
Appalled as I was, I did learn a few things. Apparently, too few.
So, few springs ago I asked a friend, a rosebush-pruning-pro, to visit my one rose bush – a long-suffering specimen by my front porch.
Yvonne patiently taught me:
- Cut off the dead stuff first. Those knobby pieces of wood will hang around year after year if you let them.
- Aim for a nice “bowl” shape. This was news to me. I’ve left many shapes behind on rose bushes. Just not bowl ones.
- Remove much of the interior growth. Branches should ideally be growing out. How did I not know this? I ask, mystified.
- Anything ugly has to go. Bam. Gone.
Maybe Adam and Eve walked around the garden with the Lord God while He pruned. Had he and she kept their minds on interesting things like the ones I just listed, they wouldn’t have been hanging around that tree.
So they got pruned.
I mention this because it is Lent, and Easter approaches which is the story of God, so merciful, so full of love, making a way for man – and man’s family – to bloom again.
I love that thought. Now that I’m better informed.
Suffering from “dead stuff?” Do you trust that God has a sure hand with the shears?