The Columnist Manifesto

The word "husbandry" makes me feel inadequate. Technically, "husbandry" refers to agricultural practices -- cultivating crops and breeding livestock -- but I can't help but think of it more broadly as a kind of dutiful, manly zest for doing chores that husbands are supposed to do. The ones that show up on the so-called (here I choke back a certain distaste for this cloying phrase) "honey-do list."

I don't have this zest. While not totally inept or clueless with tools, neither am I particularly clever with them. And my attitude toward choredom borders on ... well, let's call it "sloth."

This past weekend, I was tasked with some yard and garden husbandry: specifically, to search and destroy all vestiges of the dread Trumpet Plant. The trumpet plant (or "trumpet vine") is a viney shrub whose trunk eventually grows thicker than you can wrap your hand around, reaching heights of 8-10 feet. Last summer, we basically paid off our neighbor to remove her trumpet plant growing right along our property line.


You might ask, "why destroy this plant," whose pretty, orange flowers shaped like the "bell" of a trumpet are said to attract hummingbirds? Because, in fact the trumpet plant is not an element of "landscaping," so much as it is a sci fi monster.

To begin with, the the leaves of this plant are kind of ugly and those pretty orange flowers aren't so pretty up close -- they seem lurid and surreal, and I'm surprised they're not actually carniverous. Also, I don't recall the flowers attracting a single hummingbird in five years. They did, however, attract big black ants -- the flowers were usually crawling with them -- and wasps. That's right. Not bumblebees -- wasps. Now look again at the picture above. Imagine getting out of your car on a summer day into a faceful of wasps.

Finally, the trumpet plant must be one of the scariest breeders in the plant world. It sends out long shoots, many of which popped up along the foundation of our house. Look at the photo again: the shoots grew underneath the driveway and came up the other side. B and I took to calling it the "X-Files Plant," in honor of the X-Files epidsode with the giant underground fungus that ate people.




Well, the alien mother ship -- I mean the main trunk -- of the trumpet plant was removed this spring. But yesterday, while conducting the "search" part of my "search and destroy" mission, I counted at least two dozen new shoots. Here are a couple of them.


So I donned a pair of manly work gloves -- well, actually they looked more like yellow Mickey Mouse gloves, but Mickey is a male mouse after all -- and set about the "destroy" part of my mission.


Summoning all the husbandry at my command, I gripped each shoot powerfully as close to the root as I could, and gave a series of mighty tugs. I needn't have bothered. Each shoot snapped off as easily as a dandelion, leaving the sinister roots deep in the ground.

Surveying the disappointing results of my effort -- a small pile of trumpt shoots lying dead on the driveway -- and realizing that the shoots will be back again, I felt that this latest adventure in husbandry was not a complete success. Still, I like to think I'm not entirely without husbandly virtues. For one, I'm a good listener....

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