Weirdly enough, I don’t mind digging a hole in the ground. For one thing, the results of your work are immediate and obvious. Additionally, performing any manner of manual labor allows me to clear everything else from my mind—it’s a holiday for my brain.
Last winter, Helena and the broad
area surrounding it experienced a die-off of certain non-native decorative
juniper bushes. We lost a juniper that had been growing alongside the driveway
for thirty years.
After experiencing her first autumn
season some six months after arriving here, Desiree has become enamored with
bushes and trees that display red and orange when they turn. With this as our
guide, we agreed we needed to dig out the root ball and replace the juniper
with something that will exhibit red in the fall. On a recent visit to a local
nursery, we purchased an autumn splendor buckeye tree.
Yesterday, I excavated around the
juniper root ball, pried it from the ground, and dug a hole that would
accommodate the buckeye tree. A great order of work, that. And yet, I enjoyed
the time spent digging.
I am posting a photograph of the hole
I dug and the juniper root ball I removed to make way for planting the buckeye
tree. I placed a can of Cold Smoke Beer alongside the hole to provide a
reference for size.
—Mitchell Hegman
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