Everything's still vine, but not as vine as before

As I was devining the trees in the front yard, I reflected that, while I'm amused and poking fun at Daisy's shenanigans, she deserves credit for her skills. She survived abandonment on a dirt road with her sister, who had a broken pelvis, and her sister's six kittens. With her sister injured, it was probably Daisy who got them anything to eat and kept the kittens from wandering off-- Aunt Daisy. She was barely a year old when she was rescued and we adopted her from our animal clinic. The kittens were adopted rapidly because they were at the ultra cute age and had beautiful coloring, and her sister healed and was adopted too. Whereas Daisy is brown and orange tabby with white paws, her sister was grey tabby, much more uniformly patterned. Daisy has more orange on one hind leg than the other, one shoulder orange and the other not, and a slightly off-center blaze on her asymmetrical orange nose. She's unusual inside and out.

I have come to the painful realization that even the vines I love have to go. They are beautiful and lush and completely out of control. The last time I asked my arborist to take down a tree, it took him five weeks and several phone calls to finally do it. The tree was just at the edge of the woods and covered with trumpet vine and virginia creeper. I don't blame him at all for avoiding it. Vines make the job complicated and dangerous.

I like the things I have planted in the yard and would like to be able to see them-- coonties, camellias, sego palms, daylilies, azaleas-- but I can barely see them through the vines. Virginia creeper, Carolina jessamine, smilax, Singapore skunk vine, wild clematis, English ivy from my mother's garden, variegated ivy from gardening friends-- it all has to be pulled. I will keep a small patch of the ivy in a place where I can keep it off the trees. I'll keep my mother's species clematis on the trellis; it's much more cooperative than these other vines. I planted the Carolina jessamine near pine tree in the front yard, innocently thinking it would just grow up the tree. It grew everywhere except up the tree. It spread all over the flower bed and grew up through the camellias and I pulled it all years ago, and then it came back and covered everything on the ground again and finally grew up the pine trees. The time has come for the jessamine to go.