I went out this morning for a walk and was struck by how much the leaves have turned in the past couple of days.  Gorgeous trees aflame everywhere you look.

I thought I had seen pretty autumns until I moved to Virginia.  Fall is truly breaktaking here.

On the homefront, our burning bush is turning red, so we’re heading into the two weeks of the year where we like the burning bush.  The rest of the year, I’m not impressed.

Seeing our burning bush always reminds me of another experience with these shrubs, one that happened at our last house.  We had a whole row of these huge, overgrown bushes as foundation plantings along the back of our house.  The previous owners hadn’t kept up with them and they were humongeous.

We read in a gardening book that you could get them under control by hacking them off to about a foot off the ground, and we figured we didn’t have a lot to lose.  So, one fall, after the leaves fell, we cut them down.

Our neighbors all thought we were crazy, with lots of predictions as to the fate of these bushes, and a whole bunch of people  – most with overgrown bushes of their own – all waiting to find out whether or not it was going to work.

Sure enough, all of them came back, nice and healthy and at a manageable size.  We learned not to be afraid to prune, and our neighbors learned not to judge too quickly.  (Well, no, they didn’t really learn that.)  Lots of chainsaws the following fall from neighbors going after their own overgrown shrubs!