Our week of 80-degree days has me thinking, perhaps prematurely, of the garden. Part if me is raring to go, to poke seeds into soil and hope for the best, and the more self-preservative part of me is silently begging for another month of rest. I make half-hearted preparations, some lists, soon abandoned.

This winter hasn’t turned out how I planned, with big dreams and spreadsheets of goals and books read by the woodstove and inspiration filed away to use in warmer weather. I was looking forward to a winter of regeneration, but if anything, I am just happy to have survived what’s been a devolving spiral of doubt-tinged panic.

One would think that the longer daylight hours would bring hope—they have in year’s past. But instead it’s brought insomnia and this strange hot weather and mistimed growth is amplifying my worry. Between nightmares I lie awake and even the animals are upset—the hunt club hounds cry through the night, echoing the coyotes on the mountain. The guineas squack at three in the morning and the robin’s incessant songs sound desperately insane.

I wish I could fold the peach flowers back into their buds and slip the daffodil stalks back safe underground. I wish for more time to get my head into the gamespace required to run this place through the summer, and I wish for the ability to enjoy it all.

At the end of my driveway lives a wild beast:

I wouldn’t call this ornamental quince pretty, except maybe for a week or two each spring when it’s covered in coral blossoms. I’ve thought about chopping it down, but it’s big old shrubs like this that lend a sense of history to this farmstead. And I’d worked so hard two years ago to eradicate the honeysuckle vine that had overtaken the shrub. We had history.

(Above: Quince and honeysuckle in March 2009, before I bought the property.)

However, in our third spring of acquaintance, I wasn’t loving the looks of this monster and felt some pruning was in order. I wanted to thin out some of the older canes that had been flattened by the snow two years ago and yet still maintain the structure of the shrub and the height that conveyed its age.

Armed with a great article in the latest Fine Gardening (How to Prune the Unprunables, by Paul Cappiello), I unholstered my pruners and prepared to do battle.

And what a battle it was! This shrub is more than six feet tall, and dense with individual canes bearing inch-long spikes. If I ever need to guard a castle from marauding heathens, I’ll do it with quince beneath the windows. They’d beat a moat any day.

I had to basically climb into this medieval torture device to make some of my pruning cuts, and soon I was scratched and bleeding up to my elbows.

I had to lie down on the front porch to recover.

But eventually I thinned the shrub out by about half. It looks a lot more airy, and I am sure the postman will appreciate not having to scrape his truck against the bush each time he delivers the mail.

During cleanup I sure was missing the green tractor, which is on a winter rest cure at my father’s farm, where it’s receiving spa treatments and being coddled under roof out of the weather.

For a week after this job, broken-off thorn tips festered out of my thighs where they’d punctured through my jeans. But I have huge bunches of blooming quince branches in my house, and they sure are pretty!

But riddle me this: The blossoms that are opening inside are very pale pink or white, quite unlike the blossoms that opened dark pink outside. Does anyone know why this is?