NATURE AIDS AND ABETS LANDSCAPING

Much of my landscaping efforts are helped by nature. Sometimes it may take me a year or two to discover the little plantings that have been made by the squirrels, birds, wind or other things that move over my yard.

A few years ago I discovered the little six-inch plant that was growing by my south steps. Somehow it didn't look like a weed. Its little leaves seemed so pert and purposefully placed on sturdy, spangling stems. I pulled the grass, henbit and fleabane from around it and let it be. It must be some kind of shrub I told myself and others who wanted to know what it was. Time will tell I told them and it has.

In the beginning the leaves were somewhat rounded, but as time went by, time as in years, they grew more pointed and dense. This year the three foot shrub has blossomed. It is a privet hedge plant. I remembered from the shape of the blossoms and the fragrance that such a shrub grew on the hillside slanting down to the creek in front of our farm homestead. It was the only such shrub on the whole 280 acres. Believe me, I knew where everything grew. There were two other such lonely bushes amidst the thousands of other plants. One was the hazelnut bush and some black raspberry canes, neither planted by human hands.

No one then seemed to know the name of the shrub. Grandma said she thought it was called a private hedge plant. Each year when it bloomed, I took my doll and went to sit beside it to enjoy the wonderful fragrance.

Later, when I had established my own home and studied the landscaping catalogs. I read about and saw the pictures of the privet hedge shrub. Grandma was almost right in her pronunciation. If left to grow, the catalogs said, it will grow tall and form little white flowers similar to those of the lilac only not so large.

If kept closely pruned, the privet hedge makes a good fence and can also be shaped into different forms such as an arched gateway through which people can pass, or the likeness of a dog, bear, deer, etc .

I don't know if any of the families who have become my neighbors to the right ever planted the privet hedge shrub or whether it came to them by nature as did mine but, left alone down through the years, it has become a thing of beauty, standing about 20 feet high with a circumference of, well, I hesitate to guess. My thoughts are that several rooted shrubs have grown up together to appear to be one big shrub. In this, the latter part of May, it blooms profusely and looks like a puffy white cloud that has dropped to the ground and stayed there, spreading the perfume from heavenly regions.

The seeds following the blossoms look like tiny black olives. So now I know that my heretofore unknown shrub is a gift to me, brought by the birds of the winds.

I will move this gift this fall for, close to the concrete steps and nearby viburnum shrub, it will not have room to become a puffy, white, perfumed cloud.

All summer I'll eye inspect the land stretching westward before me to decide just where I want this small thing to grow into something as big as that of my neighbor's which I am now enjoying every day.

It is so nice when neighbors' yards become a part of your pleasing landscape.

REJOICE!

Jean Bell Mosley is an author and longtime resident of Cape Girardeau.