Specializing in the removal of live things

"If it grows, it goes."

I'm forming a new landscape company, and the above is the company motto. Screw the careful delicacy of only removing weeds. Nevermind a well-shaped wall of hedgery. You want us to prune your trees but leave them standing? You need a different company. I and my mighty army of weed whackers, clippers, shears, hedge pruners and lawn mowers will remove everything in your yard to a close-cropped three inch height.

I'm done with having to choose what stays or goes in the yard. I give up on trying to remember if I planted X. Having to decide if it's a foxtail or something destined to be pretty. Should that random fig tree stay, or will it eventually wreak havoc on a plumbing line. Nope. Not gonna do it. I've spent my time in the trenches carefully nurturing what became a burr nursery. I once weeded a patch of the yard, convinced that I was yanking up a patch of soon-to-be ickery-stickery pokery things, and realized later that I'd removed the sproutings of a packet of Alyssum seeds. I'm plagued with tree of heaven rootlets everywhere, and the oaks I DO want to grow keep falling down.

Part of the problem I face is that I've got some of the best dirt on earth. The only place that nothing will grow is under my olive trees. (Really, what does one plant under a tree that oozes acidic oil 8 months of the year?) Anything that can grow, WILL grow, and when you're confronted with 18 varieties of "Well, it's green, it has leaves, and it's in the dirt", it's hard to determine what you've got. If it's all three inches tall, who cares?

I can't even kill what I do want dead. Two summers ago, I decided to intentionally kill a rose bush. It was in the most inconvenient of places; I'd fallen into it several times because it's right by a walkway, and due to its size, there wasn't a chance of being able to transplant it. In the middle of a Redding summer, I cut the thing to the ground, didn't water it for the rest of the year, and figured it was done for. The next spring, it blew back out of the ground bigger than ever. The only thing I'd managed to do turned out pretty impressive - I'd whacked the outer canes far enough down that they grew out as wild bright-red roses, and the inner portion of the rose bush spits out buttery yellow blooms.

Beauty, even in my failure.