True, my garden has gotten a little overgrown. Renovating a house and moving across the country have been distracting. Mango mulch she said leaning over the gate to add in a low conspiratorial tone and I can hook you up It turns out... ...that Susan knows a guy with a special blend and every year he pitchforks a load of the precious dark stuff onto her garden Maybe there was some stray clover lurking under the salvia. “You look pale,” my husband said. I went outside to survey the situation with a clinical eye: crab grass, bindweed, errant holly seedlings, volunteer sedums springing up beneath a daphne. With the same zeal with which I recently adopted a pro exercise carb free sugar free alcohol free lifestyle in hopes of being... ...able to zip my skirt and tuck in a blouse the very next day I said to my husband Where are my tools I have a (Top) Kusakichi Saw Tooth Sickle ($8.90). And I was prepared to use them all. As I started pulling and cutting and teasing out the roots of vicious, hateful, mulch-repelling weeds, I made remarkable discoveries. And the first snowdrops of the season. The Japanese Student, a statue that my father-in-law’s father bought in Japan more than 50 years ago, has moved across the country and back—and back again— with me, standing guard in every garden I’ve had. There is something meditative about the process of weeding—a lonely pursuit—that connects you in spirit to every other bindweed root you’ve ever grimly stripped, like a varicose vein, from a garden. You can get into a state of Pure Gardening, concentrating so hard on grubbing out every single onion bulb that you forget whether it’s January 2013 in Mill Valley, CA or October 1989 in Huntington, New York. Barely lunchtime, but I was exhausted. I surveyed my progress—averting my eyes from the clover that was still cavorting in the jade plants—and realized I probably have another month of hardcore weeding ahead. In the meantime, maybe Susan will bring me a vase full of hydrangeas.