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Updated: June 24, 2025
We rake the grass, and then, gilding refined gold, we sweep it. There is a tradition that Miss Lois May once went to the length of trimming her grass about the doorstone and clothes-pole with embroidery scissors; but that was a too-hasty encomium bestowed by a widower whom she rejected next week, and who qualified his statement by saying they were pruning-shears.
The side pockets of my jacket are usually weighted down with pruning-shears, a sharp knife, and a handled copper wire, always, indeed, in June, when I walk in my orchard. June is the month of all months for the prudent orchardist to go thus armed, for the apple-tree borer is abroad in the land.
They left their mark on every windward street or fence or gable, on the outlying sand dunes; they lashed the slow coasters home, and hurried them to sea again; they whipped the bay into turbulence on their way to Contra Costa, whose level shoreland oaks they had trimmed to windward as cleanly and sharply as with a pruning-shears.
Pruning-shears, and a pruning-pole, with a chisel at the end, can be procured of those who deal in agricultural utensils. Thinning is also an important but very delicate operation. As it is the office of the leaves to absorb nourishment from the atmosphere, they should never be removed, except to mature the wood or fruit.
Two men had appeared from somewhere, and were digging in the vegetable garden. After giving them certain directions Mr. Vedder and I both found five-tined forks and went into the rose garden and began turning over the rich soil, while Mrs. Vedder, with pruning-shears, kept near us, cutting out the dead wood. It was one of the charming forenoons of my life.
A little study of the habit of growth in the peach will show that, to obtain the best results, the pruning-shears are almost as essential as in the case of the grape-vine. More than in any other fruit-tree, the sap tends strongly toward the ends of the shoots. Left to Nature, only the terminal buds of these will grow from year to year; the other buds lower down on the shoots fail and drop off.
Now in New Orleans the case is so different that really the amateur gardener elsewhere has not all his rights until he knows why it is so different. Let us, therefore, look into it. In that city one day the present writer accosted an Irishman who stood, pruning-shears in hand, at the foot of Clay's statue, Lafayette Square.
Cobb I happened several times to be mounted on my step-ladder, busy with my pruning-shears, when he was decoying her around her garden just over the fence buckled in to suffocation, and with his long epaulettes golden in the sun like tassels of the corn. I was engaged in exterminating this insect on the last day of his sojourn.
Kirk protested, clinging very tightly to her hand in the midst of all this strange, pushing crowd. The people were gathering at the sunny side of the house; the auctioneer, at the window, was selling pots and candles and pruning-shears and kitchen chairs.
So absorbed was she in her chaos of feeling and thoughts that she did not even hear the humble symphony of the hundreds of bees drawing their treasure from the golden hearts of the roses; and did not see, across the path a score of yards away, the tall figure of Joe Ellison among the rosebushes, pruning-shears in hand, with which he had been cutting out dead blossoms, gazing at her with that hungry, admiring, speculative look with which he had regarded the young women upon the beach.
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