When my wife Rosemary
and our two daughters and I moved from our all-paid for
townhouse in Burnaby
to a big corner lot house in Kerrisdale in 1986 we took up gardening seriously.
Rosemary was a tad more practical but I went by the book. I decided I wanted
the perfect lawn, Plato’s lawn as Essence. So I did everything possible to
achieve that goal. This included mowing with a reel mower.
Our house has had and still haves a laurel
hedge that fronts the house and then wraps around to the boulevard. It is long
and wide. To prune it you have two do the front side, the back side and the
top. The first two years I did the pruning (in the fall rains) with a pair of
Swiss secateurs. It took me a week.
After that I decided to become more
practical and semi abandoned my expectations for the perfect lawn and pruned
the hedge with mechanical hedge clippers.
In the last three years with the advanced
of my arthritis I now use electric hedge trimmers. Only I would know the
difference and when people laud me for the great hedge job I keep my mouth
shut.
