May 18, 2004 The unseasonably wet weather that pummeled Texas over the weeks past brought out the weeds - weeds of all types and colors of flower and strategies for survival and propagation, some attractive, some troublesome, all in profusion, many proffering poison in some degree to anyone who might brush by, or dare to uproot.

While two of my mother's nephews use mowers to keep down the untidy wildness (Robert regularly mowing paths from the gate past the persimmon tree to the fence where I feed the donkey, Bill periodically mowing the entire half-acre of space between the planted rows), I as the garden's new designated husbandman prefer to use hedge trimming shears and my hands to grub out the matted plant mass that encroaches upon tree and bush bases, doing a bit each day that I enter the garden as my entrance fee.

It was while sprucing up the biggest of the garden's fig trees (that fig that yields best sits out of the garden, near the house) that I noticed leafy branches from another species splaying out amongst the fig's foliage. On circumambulating the tree I found several more such branches, and when I looked towards its apex I saw the crown of a slender tree extending at least two feet above the point where the fig leveled off. A hurried inspection discovered similar trees in similarly compromising positions under every other fig, under the pomegranate and persimmon trees, near several pecans, and even in the vicinity of a few of the larger rosebushes. Robert & Bill confirmed that these were hackberry trees, two or three large specimens of which line one side of the property. Neither cousin had much good to say for the hackberries - you can't really climb them, or burn their wood, or do a whole lot with their berries. Birds enjoy the berries, though, and those that dined on hackberries and then flew over to the fruit trees to continue their progressive dinner ended up depositing the hackberry seeds in surroundings that they took to as readily as the proverbial duck takes to water.

Though impressed by the hackberry's tenacity, I did not & do not approve of its stealthy infiltration of garden areas into which it was not invited. After a brief rant to the tree for its cheek I informed it blandly that the majority of its members in the garden would be going, after which I set about cutting down the majority of those standing, leaving a couple of the more independent saplings in honor of the hackberry's persistence as a species. A bonfire later, and the marauders were ash, just in time for the sudden torrential rain that fell shortly after.

The rain indirectly delayed my arrival in New Hampshire, but eventually I made it there, in time to deliver a lecture for NAMARUPA, and to take pleasure in how the three Moses kids are growing into their places in the Moses Family Garden (no hackberries there!).

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