The problem with natural

This morning I pruned my shrubs for the first time in recent memory. I wasn't even going to do it, but yesterday when I was at the local hardware store buying electrical tape to patch up the cord on the vacuum cleaner that I ran over, I saw pruning shears.

I still wouldn't have done it anytime soon, but I had left the shears on the kitchen table overnight, and while waiting to drive my daughter to school, I thought I would take a few whacks. Well, I couldn't very well leave the job half done, so after the chauffeuring, I hauled out the ladder to better fix these bad haircuts.

The reason it has been so long is because I haven't felt like pruning. But also I had decided that I like things "natural." (It's possible that one of these two mentioned reasons is an imposter.) I had decided to mock the whole middle-class idea of manicured green lawns and tidy shrubbery as bourgeois, stifling, lacking in creativity, and freedom-averse. People my age will recall the 1962 radio hit "Little Boxes":

Little boxes on the hillside,

Little boxes made of ticky-tacky.

Little boxes on the hillside,

And they all look just the same.

But the shrub at the base of the front steps, to which I had hitherto conferred a perfectly geometric dome, was now encroaching on the mailman's passage, and the heavy snows of last winter had deformed the boughs of the yews. So I restored these as best I could. I stepped back and saw that it was good.

Also, I noticed that after giving the rhododendrons by the window a good, deep trim, there is more air circulating in the house.

"Natural" is good, but as my clippers were chattering I remembered what C.S. Lewis said in The Four Loves. He pointed out that it is not a disparagement of a garden to say that it needs constant tending to. It will remain a garden and not a desert, only if someone does the hard work of pruning and weeding.

Lewis was making a point about love, of course. Being "natural" in one's relationships is not all it's cracked up to be-if what you mean by "natural" is the indifference to thoughtfulness, courtesy, and manners.

Listen to commentaries by Andrée Seu.