![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
B&E Enterprises has informed me that, under the terms of my work-for-hire contract with them, I retain full electronic bitching rights to the hour or less of gardening I performed in their backyard on Saturday. It is my intention to take full advantage of those rights.
E.'s neighbour had a large trailing rose planted right up against their common fence. After some minute examination of its tendrils, shoots, and root stock, I identified it as a Rosa satanica, popularly known as the "Rose of Sharon Osbourne". It lacks the large, dark-coloured thorns of other rose species. Instead, the stems are covered in a nasty coating of piercing slivers. And it doesn't just send a few runners along the surface to see where they might touch earth and sprout. No, it also sends them out a foot below the ground so that they can slip under both the wooden barrier and the brick edging and pop up in the goddamn lawn.
To stop it, you'd basically have to dig a trench along the property line and bury a plastic or metal divider. Getting out as much as we did involed two people and several garden implements. At one point, e. slipped the spade under a particularly large knot of foots and leveraged it upwards while I scrabbled around it, trying to find a spot where I could wedge in the clippers and cut it free. Trying to do the same thing on a smaller scale by myself, I completely destroyed an antique trowel.
Evil, I tell you!
Other than that, it was a supremely pleasant afternoon. They had mooted going to a movie, but they finally came to the same conclusion I did: Too fucking gorgeous to go inside if you don't have to! In my case, I had to enjoy the day for two, since poor![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
monshu was stuck at a conference in some godforsaken Southern podunk. Austen, I think it's called? He said that it voted not to secede with the rest of Texas, but I can't see that it gained anything as a consequence.
E.'s neighbour had a large trailing rose planted right up against their common fence. After some minute examination of its tendrils, shoots, and root stock, I identified it as a Rosa satanica, popularly known as the "Rose of Sharon Osbourne". It lacks the large, dark-coloured thorns of other rose species. Instead, the stems are covered in a nasty coating of piercing slivers. And it doesn't just send a few runners along the surface to see where they might touch earth and sprout. No, it also sends them out a foot below the ground so that they can slip under both the wooden barrier and the brick edging and pop up in the goddamn lawn.
To stop it, you'd basically have to dig a trench along the property line and bury a plastic or metal divider. Getting out as much as we did involed two people and several garden implements. At one point, e. slipped the spade under a particularly large knot of foots and leveraged it upwards while I scrabbled around it, trying to find a spot where I could wedge in the clippers and cut it free. Trying to do the same thing on a smaller scale by myself, I completely destroyed an antique trowel.
Evil, I tell you!
Other than that, it was a supremely pleasant afternoon. They had mooted going to a movie, but they finally came to the same conclusion I did: Too fucking gorgeous to go inside if you don't have to! In my case, I had to enjoy the day for two, since poor
monshu was stuck at a conference in some godforsaken Southern podunk. Austen, I think it's called? He said that it voted not to secede with the rest of Texas, but I can't see that it gained anything as a consequence.Tags: