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Blood, Devastation, Death, War, and Horror

Blood Devastation Death War and Horror

“Hello, good evening and welcome to another edition of ‘Blood, Devastation, Death, War and Horror’, and later on we’ll be talking to a man who does gardening.” [Monty Python’s Flying Circus, episode 30]

Sadly, there are very few gardening references in Monty Python episodes and movies, but I treasure each one. The bits about shrubbery and recognizing different types of trees from quite a long way away come to mind fairly frequently, but I don’t often have the opportunity to use this one – until this week.

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The Chipper/Shredder Experiment

Meadow at Hayefield Summer 2007

When I decided to let a few acres of my property go back to meadow nearly a decade ago, I expected the results to look like what I’d been used to seeing before I built my home there, when the land was a hayfield: lots of grasses, a few milkweeds and other summer wildflowers, and some goldenrods in fall. And for the first five years or so, that was pretty much the overall effect, as shown in the July 2006 photo above.

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