Whenever it comes time to actually sell our house, I'm going to make the neighbors a major selling point. Two days ago I was trying to trim, with hopes to destroy, the devil's bush: the bouginvillea. This beast of preposterous proportions has simply been growing and growing and has taken over a large portion of my backyard.So I decided to put my foot down and get physical with this feared and thorny monster/bush. While walking his dog past my yard, my neighbor saw my feeble efforts and asked me if I needed any help. He's probably seen many young folks lost to the dreaded Boginvillea bush over the years, and didn't want to see another young whipper-snapper go down fighting alone. I took him up on the offer as he promised to bring his trimmer the next day.
The next day came, and in order to stop the bees from swarming on me (they were just buzzing by my head at first so as to drop hints), I asked to borrow some real bug spray from another neighbor. This young man also volunteered to tackle the beast with me, bringing a trimmer, machete, and chainsaw.
By dark, with all three instruments working-I took the machete and unfortunately wasn't wearing long sleeves-the once fearful beast lay slain. Now to get rid of it...
Can't beat neighbors like that. If only I were as neighborly as to volunteer for such a task!
2 comments:
Next time you get bougainvillea, confine it to a pot as we do; then the trimming is easy and you still can enjoy the flowers.
Gus
I, myself, attacked a bougainvillea in our backyard hedge. It hadn't grown to monster proportions like yours, but what satisfaction I had at cutting that thing down to size and then digging out the roots. At a home we lived previously there was a huge bush which I would periodically attack, always at the wrong time of year, but it always came back. My kids dubbed me, "The Mad Hacker." G
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