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cherazade's back yard
...has two large old trees in the
middle and a dense, unruly tangle of smaller trees toward the back.
Neither of the old large trees has ever been particularly nice. The Elm spent
the first ten or fifteen years of Scheherazade's occupation dropping
limbs large
and small at the slightest puff of breeze. The other large old tree,
the catalpa, continues to drop
copious quantities of large leaves and bean pods which never decompose (about
20 large bags per year) and is not very affectionately known as The Giant Weed.
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or many years...
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Scheherazade allowed the World Outside to flourish and proliferate.
This in turn led to an explosion in the Red Berry Bush population.
That was okay, because
Scheherazade was not fond of lawnmowing, and the encroachment of the Red Berry
Bushes increasingly minimized the need to mow by slowly killing all the grass
with shade. |
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er friends
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tried to encourage
Scheherazade to embrace gardening. One was a landscaper, and he planted many
things, all of which dwindled within a few years except for a pair of barberry bushes and the
Amazing Miracle Cannas that require no attention whatsoever to thrive.
That's the kind of plant
Scheherazade likes best! Any plant that can maintain itself for sixteen
years without attention is okay by her. |
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ne day ...
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the young son of friends
gave Scheherazade the tiniest little slip of a redbud
tree that he'd picked up at Earth Day. She planted it within a stone
circle and it also
flourished. |
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s time passed ...
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she accumulated quite a few plants: a pile of
lilies of the valley rescued from a house demolition, several trees, some
shrubberies, some ferns, a bunch of sedum groundcover (also salvaged) and other
miscellaneous flora. Scheherazade
got some bricks, some rocks, some dirt, some lopping shears and a shovel, and
began to make flowerbeds to organize or contain the
plants. She also cut back the Red Berry Bushes to give the beds light. |
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ow ...
even though a modicum of order has been
inflicted upon the back yard, its native impulse toward Chaos is still strong.
The veneer of cultivation is thin, and at any time it might again crack and
reveal again its jungle nature in all its glorious disorder.
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~ B A C K ~
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