that's why I call me Miss Adventure

Sunday gardening: the pomegranate tree is looking terrible. No one has cared for it for years and it was a tangle of dead branches, suckers and new shoots, several fruits from last year still rotting on their stems. I intervened to clean it up, without fully understanding the personality of this particularly ornery plant.

Did you know pomegranates have thorns?

I've only just returned inside to google pomegranate trees. Nothing I've turned up suggests that pomegranate thorns provoke unpleasant irritation, swelling and itching. They do. And they pierce right through gardening gloves.

Dora, the household puppy, who enjoys helping me in the garden, just tried to plant one of S.'s shoes. She has not yet unearthed any plants, but has trampled my primroses to death and has excavated several large holes that she enjoys digging in frantically while barking at herself, then runs repeated circles around the oleander growling, then returns to digging. Her mother is a truffle hunter, Dora just digs and crunches up snails that she finds.