Small Ways | Rosemary Topiary 2

Simple, reachable, doable

Simple. Reachable. Doable. Small ways. They pack enough punch to change your world, or your day. Or maybe, simply and gloriously, they’ll change your moment. Small Ways is a series about small objects, small gestures, small touches. Small ways for living well.

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Daylight swept past and rushed in ahead of me as I opened the door of the old weathered shed. It fell across half the potting bench and a good wedge of the worn wooden floor, including Nellie Belle’s old dog bed that still sits where it always has, there to offer her a warm place to snooze while she kept an eye out the open door, waiting for us to roll down the driveway after dark from an away basketball game.

Those years are gone, now, and so is she, but her bed is still there, just the same.

I stepped into the shed, carefully clutching an embrace of three potted topiaries, a pair of shears, and an unruly ball of twine. (And my trusty camera, too, of course. I’d forgotten my tripod, but balancing the camera atop the toolbox, wedging it in place with various tools, seemed to work just fine.) I set my armload gently down on the galvanized top of the potting bench and got to work.

You may remember when I potted these baby rosemary plants last fall, when I first trimmed the leaves off their short stems, leaving tufts of green only at the top few inches, starting them off toward becoming topiaries.