I have a new garden strategy about the wounded soldiers of the garden beds.

Formerly, and currently to some extent, I have left less-than-optimum plants to languish in the garden because of one reason or another. In some cases, I may have wanted to make bouquets, as I often do with the zinnias that get brown and mildewy during the late summer months. Other times, a favorite plant may have done poorly and I want to nurse it back to health.

This strategy has left me with garden beds that look faded and tired, or just plain messy. Sure, it might be nice for a favorite plant to recuperate at its leisure in its original home, instead of going to the “hospital” of the pot collection by the house, where it can be tended more carefully and where it is kept isolated from the plants that are doing better. But keeping it there causes an unseemly blight among the otherwise profusely blooming plants.

This is also the case sometimes with some of our “pet vices.” We nurse and baby some of our less desirable qualities, right in plain sight of all, as if we are proud of them. We might make excuses, such as “I’ll work on my problem of ______ some day” in much the same manner as I might intend to trim back the mildewed zinnias, yet never find the time.

Over the summer, I took a couple weeks to visit family in Canada and left my pots in the care of friends. In order to make their job easier, I collected the ones on the porches and here and there among the yard, and put them in a more convenient place. I was thrilled to see, upon my return, that the petunias that were neglected earlier had actually grown and were blooming nicely!

What I’m learning is to be ruthless with my plants. When they don’t perform to my satisfaction, they should be trimmed or pruned back. If that isn’t what they need, they can be moved to a place where they can be cared for and corrected, while not spoiling the appearance of the rest of the flower beds.

These plants must be considered enemies of my garden goals. I must no longer take them as prisoners, for it makes me the real prisoner. I become the servant of the less showy, haggard, fading ghosts of the plants I had intended to use as decorative complements in the landscape.

The pruning scissors must be used swiftly and without mercy. And the odd thing about this, as more than one gardener friend has taught me, is that the plant often flushes out more beautifully after a severe pruning.

“Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He [a]prunes it so that it may bear more fruit” (John 15:2, HCSB).

Bad habits and vices need to be treated the same. To borrow a phrase from Barney Fife on the Andy Griffith Show, “Nip it, nip it in the bud!”

“But now you must also put away all the following: anger, wrath, malice, slander, and filthy language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, since you have put off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self. You are being renewed in knowledge according to the image of your Creator” (Colossians 3:8-10).

We renew our gardens by judicious pruning. Renew your soul!

Christine Berglund @ www.forthright.net