This week I'll be mostly leaving the lilies to look after themselves

Thwop

(This is not about leaving.)

I'm not a gardener.  By any stretch of the imagination.

But here's the issue.  I spend the week sitting at a desk looking at words and numbers on a screen, and thinking about uninsured loss recovery, or mid-term adjustments, or catering for both pipe-delimited and comma-separated values, or secure transmission, or stream file integrity checking, or whatever.  So when I get home on the weekend, I walk through the front garden, I just happen to notice some nature that needs attending to, and a primeval instinct kicks in...

We've got lilies both sides of the path on the way up to the front door.  For quite a while it wasn't obvious how to deal with them.  Now, as I've mentioned, I'm not a gardener.  (By any stretch of the imagination.)  I'm quite happy to take a hedge trimmer to a shrub-like thing and hack it back until it is vaguely smaller and tidier than it was before.  But lilies?  You can't trim them or prune them.  So what do you do?

If you just leave them alone, that's fine until all the flowers die off and look brown and shrivelled and nasty, and the leaves go yellow and get too long, and the entire row of plants starts dropping over onto the path.

If you chop them down with shears, that's fine but they look horrible for quite a while until they grow back.

So here's the trick.  Leave them alone initially.  Then once a week (when you get home after a week of staring at a computer screen) (and when the primeval instinct to subdue the earth becomes too overwhelming to ignore), check for the one or two flowers that have started shrivelling up.  Grab one with both hands about two thirds of the way down the stem, and pull with a firm sharp upward motion.  The flower and entire stem just pops out of the ground with a satisfying 'thwop'.  Cast it to one side, and continue your way along the path.  You can do this with the leaves too, but you need to grab them much closer to the ground, and use more or a twist and rip because otherwise they can take the bulb out of the ground with them.

Ah, that's better.  It's Friday evening, I'm still wearing a suit, but a week's worth of analysis and design has just melted away into a ten minute session of getting my hands in there with some real stuff.

This has been my weekly therapy session for quite a while now.  But the flowering season has come to an end.  Last week I pulled the last of the flowers, tidied the last of the leaves, and chucked a last few handfuls of plant food down.

Next time around, someone else is going to have to get in there with the lilies.

(Oh look, it is about leaving after all.)