Looking out my Backdoor: I got pruned

Any person raised on the Montana plains knows how precious is every sprout, blade or leaf of green. Precious. We baby each new evidence of life, coddle it, rejoice when it survives the season.

Living here in central Mexico with year-round green, flowers, fruits, one learns to do differently.

I had to discover how to prune all manner of precious greenery before they morphed into Audrey, the blood-sucking terror from “Little Shop of Horrors” and took over my whole garden world.

It ain’t easy, Babe. But I learned, slowly. In the beginning I cringed with each chop of the secateurs. I...