I have decided to move on. Without completing the lower left terrace, that is. It’s not that I’ve given up there — not at all! — it’s just that, for now, filling in the gaping hole that is left in my “design” requires money, (it also requires an, ahem, design), whereas moving up to the next terrace and recommencing my campaign against the “settlers” there is absolutely free. With holiday time fast approaching, need I say more? If I had a dime for every paperwhite I have to dig up I’d be rich enough to stop “reaping” and go back to “sowing,” but obviously the flaw in that logic is fatal. For it is the paperwhites themselves that must go.

This is what I pulled up in just one half-hour session yesterday.

By the time this garden is done I will have killed so many paperwhites that, if there is some sort of Hague Tribunal for the horticultural world, I will surely be called up to it. I keep trying to tell myself that they are just glorified scallions; still, I feel like a brute. Kind of. But also, at moments, gloriously powerful. Like Ghengis Khan, but with a shovel instead of a spear.

Is this how all genocidal maniacs get started? Anyway. Tomorrow, the rose bush. Better rest up.