A four leafed bouganvilla....I am giggling.

and the more I look at the shot with the garbage cans, all I can think is that THOSE shrubs behind have some goofy growth going on.

He needs medication AND an intervention! I was afraid the dividing shrubs had been removed and your back 40 was no more...

Something must be done...

WHY, Francisco, WHY???? What did they do to you to deserve such treatment ??!!??

Yes, Francisco trims the geranium in half, but leaves the crazy goofy shrubs behind the garbage cans alone. GO FIGURE.

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! That makes me want to cry!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Maybe he has a blog called 'Crazy Gardener Francisco' and he just needs some new material for his fans!

What is this guys credentials? How did he get to be the gardener is my question.

My mother is spinning on an axis in her grave because of that crime! Watch out, Francisco! Watch out for that bolt of lightning signed "BMcG"!!

NOOOOOO! Maybe he has some kind of plant dyslexia?
Side note: Damn - i want a geranium plant! Preferably without an accompanying Francisco . . .

Francisco reminds me of the alleged gardener my mother hired last summer. This guy hacked the rose bushes I had planted at my mom's almost to the ground. There are a lot of guys running around in California these days who claim to be gardeners when in actuality all they're really good for is large scale clearing.

Is he a Brazilian Bush Whacker?

Watch out ladies, Fransisco has electric shears and he is looking at your bushes.

A long moment of silence will be observed for your fallen foliage. I always worry, during major trims for winter that my roses and fruit trees will never be green and leafy again...just this week they started coming back and I let out a huge sigh of relief (again)..I couldn't imagine having them chopped in the Spring. I assume that Francisco has severe control issues that should be addressed before again handling shears near any type of plant life.

I have a solution. Send Francisco to my house. Since the soon-to-be-former husband (aka the one who handled the part of the property that begins at the back door and has bugs and growing stuff on it) left last fall, I haven't really checked up on the old homestead like I should. Too busy with the divorce crap and the crying and the massive application of ice cream to notice until yesterday when I finally peeked outside to discover a veritable JUNGLE out there. If you'll just send Francisco here, I think we can solve both of our problems!

That's just a shame. A cryin' shame.

I'm with KJ...send him my way...I would rather have NO shrubbery than have to maintain it.

Our trash can looked similar to yours after I chopped the dead lavendar and the (overtaking the yard) ivy. Didn't need no electicity, all woman power. Hear me ROAR.

Thanks so much for the laugh today. "He's the one with the electric shears" Hah!

Jesus K-Ci JoJo and Mary!, what did he do to your yard?!

wow. medication indeed. i understand the whole pruning idea, but this seems a leetle bit over the top, shall we say? sounds like it's time to go from charming southern belle to umbrella wielding LA bad ass, huh?

Francisco MUST BE STOPPED! Perhaps some wine would help?

Um ... maybe signs attached to the shrubs with the universal NO circle and slash with pruning shears?

omg. wtf? ffs!

Okay now even I have to say something: Who ever told Francisco he was a gardener... I mean Jeez...one does NOT prune the side of any sort of geranium. Give the man a gardening book with really good photos.

In the meantime, tell not to touch one more damn plant!!!!! Seriously...yikes.

Good lord...get that gardener a hammock and tie him into it!

And maybe a strong drink.

laurie, you always make me laugh. Well, most always...except on those days you make me sniffle.

I know I just commented but I just had a thought. What if he was all into topiaries and wanted to be a topiary artist, and to him the geranium now looks like a -- a ummm -- a sleeping snake? Or a resting puppy? Maybe that's it. Francisco is trying to free his inner topiary artisan.

is he an illegal? is he taking out frustrations on the american government since our president is named "Bush"? Is he good looking??? Does he eat Rice-a-roni? (isn't that some kind of Francisco treat???!!)

I had someone take out SOME of my overgrown front hedges (WHICH I DESPISED--and you couldn't even get up the steps) and Disneyland Dad still hasn't forgiven me...

Bad gardening is a bit like a bad haircut. You just wait for it to grow out.

Why did he hack up the geraniums - which should be trimmed in that manner, EVER - and leave the funky spikey plants behind the trash can? Was it because the trash can was full? I think he needs a job at Disneyland. They have lots of trimmed stuff, right?

Hilarious.

You know, trimming shrubs is a lot like waxing your eyebrows - once you start it's hard to stop but if you're not careful you'll end up with nothing.

Sounds like poor Francisco needs a new career. I guess we should all be thankful he's not a Gentleman Who Thinks He's Good At Making Women Look Pretty.

Your gardener must be related to the gardeners in my complex... my shrubs went from 5 feet to 2 feet, and the nifty eucalyptus *tree* is now a few scraggly shoots. (It was initially chopped off at 4 feet, and then someone backed over it with a mini construction thingy. I'm not sure why, given that it was 6 inches from my wall. :P (I am glad they didn't back into my wall... even if it meant sacrificing the former tree. I prefer my wall to be in one piece.)

He massacres all the good stuff, and yet the shrub behind the trash cans is in need of trimming! As The Donald would say: Francisco, you're fired!

That is so awful. I'm going to have a big glass of wine with dinner tonight and there will be a toast in honor of your poor yard.

Here in Seattle, there's a group called Plant Amnesty whose mission is to wage a war on Bad Pruning. Check out the Madness Gallery on their website (www.plantamnesty.org). Somebody needs to stop the madness--looks like a job for the Mary Poppins Gang!

I'm in agreement with those who would like to borrow Francisco for a weekend of garden pruning. I have a lovely section of my yard that appears to be in serious need of his "tender ministrations." Heck if you come with him I'll throw in a whole bottle of wine and a bbq.

EEEEK! Wow.

Sort of reminds me of a hairdresser I once knew. *Shiver*

Maybe you should teach him to knit, then he would have something creative to do with his hands.

Francisco will probably tell you he just did that to provoke the geranium to regenerate itself yet bushier and more floribundant. Or maybe he has it in for geraniums.

My impression of California vegetation is that it is capable of anything. As long as it gets enough rain it will keep growing. In time of drought it will mutate into a major fire hazard.

You and your blog make me laugh. I have a very close friend who is moving to Crazytown. Maybe we can sit and knit when I visit her.

Hey, at least you have a gardener!

hahahahah, this is hilarious!!! All those garbage cans filled with good little plants and yet he misses the bushes behind the garbage cans. Here is a tip--put the garbage cans all around the plans you want to keep

Hmm, maybe Francisco is like me and despises pelargoniums (a.k.a. "geraniums")? (ducking & covering now)

Um, also, today is free cone day at Ben & Jerry's! For real! Free ice cream cones from noon until 8 pm!! Go get your free ice cream. It'll make you feel better about those nasty pelargoniums. ;)

Helen

Laurie, do you have a friend (preferably Spanish-speaking) who can have a word with Francisco on your (and your landlord's) behalf? I understand the desire to avoid confrontation but it sounds as though some boundaries need to be set.

oooooooh, that reminds me today is dollar scoop day at Baskin Robins.... (we don't have Ben and Jerrys here in the heartland....)

it will grow back - I promise. My neighbor lady used to do the same thing to her yard and then send people over to my yard when I wasn't home. It all grows back - just give it a little water!

Let us know when he's due to operate again. We could have ourselves a sit-in and form a human blockade around the remaining plants, shouting, "Hell No! Let Them Grow!"

Oh dear. I do hope you find a new a gardner. If you lived closer, I'd send you my Enrique. ;)

Oh Laurie, Mr. Larry does the same thing every spring. Our yard is sparse enough. He cuts back every blooming plant waaaaay too much for my taste. He says this is the only way that the plants will grow back healthier and stronger. Yeah, right. At least you're not married to Francisco.

Hmm...I say he's cut off...it appears to me that maybe you're not the only one who sits and has a beer with him when he's done...maybe everyone does. That could explain his over-exuberance with the power tools...(what does he use, a chainsaw? Look at all the leafy carnage in your trash!)

I haven't read the above comments because it's time to go home and I'm SOOOO ready, so someone else may have already pointed this out.

How on earth did Francisco miss the trimming the shrubbery behind the trash cans!!! THOSE need attention, not geraniums! Sheesh! Unbelievable.

You must Francisco under control before you start growing the square watermelons!

Ellen - she is married to Francisco, remember? There was even a post about that.

Laurie - my condolences on the loss of your foliage.

Ai caramba!

Freddy Scissorhands

Oh help and bother! I am laughing hysterically at your humor of a pitiful situation! Edward Scissorhands has been reincarnated! Here is to pouring another glass of wine the size of you head - I will have one with you and toast to being another "balls-less" person!

Thanks for sharing your day!

I see that Francisco subscribes to the 'Agent Orange' theory of gardening......ah, yes, your pictures brought back memories of a very sad little orange tree who would not bear fruit again......

A1 suggestion: buy a thin manual booklet with LOTS of picture examples, showing HOW to prune various kinds of plants and trees...and GIFT it to Francisco... with an EARNEST look on your face...
enough said.

I have the solution! He just keeps piling the cuttings into the garbage bins, the garbage bins overflow, the cuttings cover the garbage bins, and there you are-- new bushes.

I cannot believe the state of that poor geranium! Listen, would a good old-fashioned Southern bellow do any good? When a Southerner starts bellowing, with the accent and all, most people realize that this Southerner means business and also might possibly be crazy, what with phrases like "smack you till you're cross-eyed" and "Jesus in a sidecar," and the sheer volume of it all. Next time you see Francisco, just start hollerin. I'll come out and holler too, if you want. :)

Funny stroy, I think we have the same lawn guy. He didn't show up for over four weeks (you should have seen my lawn) and then when he does show up, he hacked my lemon tree to death. I can walk under it now without whacking my head on the branches, but this is ridiculous. Axe-wielding gardeners must be stopped!

Laurie - I was going to offer to teach you some choice words in Spanish to share with Francisco! However, after reading about your fun SnB group and seeing the freezing drizzle that spring for some odd reason decided to throw at us here in Nebraska (can someone please tell nature that it is ALMOST MAY?!) anyway, I work as a Spanish interpreter - maybe that's what you need......would your landlord fly you out an interpreter from Nebraska? :-)
umm...yeah...probably not...but choice words are still up for offer.

Ah, gardeners... When we first moved into our house, my mom planted Oleander bushes outside the breakfast room window in hopes that they would grow tall enough to block our neighbor's ugly house. Every year, about a week after they finally got tall enough to cover the window, in come the gardeners, "pruning" our beautiful 6' tall bushes to 1', leafless stumps, which my dad would then hit with the lawnmower. But the ugly bushes out front got to live.

(p.s. this is my first post but I LOVELOVELOVE your blog. hope your bushes recover!)

Oh.my.god. If that had happened at my house, I'd be pruning a crucial body part off of that man in a heartbeat...

I'm with Yvonne - when you don't make me go all teary, you completely crack me up! Reading your blog really brightens my day.

Wow that looks like the same job done at my dad's house. You can't have the same gardener though since he lives in San Diego. My Dad jokes about that they "cut and blow" that's pretty much it. They hack of everything and then blow it away.

And yikes to that Geranium. My friend has a nursery and she grows them for show. That is NOT the way the prune a Geranium. The good news is they are hearty plants and grow back quickly. :-)

El Loco Fransisco!

Fire. Francisco.

Maybe bribe a teenager in the neighborhood to give him the news?

don't they have pills for passive aggressiveness yet?

Geraniums actually do need to be cut back severely every spring. They grow back even better than before. If you don't do it, they get woody and prone to disease.

I don't have the mental stamina to read all the comments and am sure someone said it...but ummm, why hack one bush to near dessimation while leaving the one behind the cans untrimmed???

Nature is resilliant...but I think Francisco should go visit my mom's house...he'd have a FIELD day...they get love-notes from the fire department about such things as TOO MANY TREES and bushes that need cutting...

Ah, well. At least you and Landlord Bob can relate to each other, eh? Poor plant, tho.

OMG! His chopping would really drive me crazy. Did the geranium plant cover the sides up to the grass? Also, I don't understand, is a geranium an perennial in CA?

Ok......so: hired guy to "trim" the jasmine: the jerk pulled it out.........me: basically a polite person: yelled........yelled a lot......did not pay him......he: basically did not get it & I realized that this is the way it is with minimum pay people: they don't get it: PERIOD......and need to be supervised every minute.....which they hate, but hey, who is paying.....

If you read Miss Marple mysteries......you understand this about "gardeners"....they need supervision, they are lazy, they do not like to work....and they don't.........

SO: quit feeling bad......he is a whacker, a mow and blow guy......but not a gardener.....he isn't getting it and won't.......

SORRY: it just is annoying to hire / pay someone and realize that they are destructive.....and no, you shouldn't get me started on people who clean houses: nope, they don't get it either.....

Betsy, yes, geraniums are perennials in California.

You should make little signs for your plants "Please don't hurt me, I've got children and 15,000 little ones on the way!" maybe he'll have mercy on the survivors?

Oh. dear. lord.

I'm so very sad, very sad indeed. Landlord Bob sounds funny though, I like his reasoning of "he's the one with electric shears."

OMG!! That is horrible!

Crazy,
you crack me up. I tend to feel ball less too these days.

What I find particularly amusing is that the shrubs BEHIND the trashcans with all the clippings (maimings) in them, THOSE shrubs, which desperately need trimming, go untrimmed.

If I had come home to find my flowering plants and shrubs whacked to hell that way, I think I would not only have fired Francisco, (whether I had the authority to or not), I would have fired AT Francisco, with a shotgun. You are far too patient, and so is your landlord.

I guess it's a good thing you're in L.A. where stuff grows back quickly....

I will end this before I let loose another rant about men who THINK they are gardeners and their need to prune the very life out of any greenery they can find....

I could send you some kudzu, FedEx. That might also help with homesickness, should it occur. ;)

Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse! I can join Suzanne and send kudzu too!

Now, darlin', you're Southern. Just plant some kudzu and set him to it ;)

(he obviously is a work-a-holic and feels he's slacking if he's not pruning *something*)

I got a tich woosy when I saw the geranium. I can't believe this guy is supposed to be a pro! My Dad prunes like that too, I agree with the folks who said it's a boy thing.

what a shame... francisco needs to be stopped... and fast... the oxygen levels of california could be at least 20% higher depending on how many yards he is butchering i mean, keeping. think of it...

Jesus, 81 comments? Seriously, do read all the comments in one go or do you have to take a potty break ever 10 or 20?

I needed one.

Don't feel so bad about your horribly sheared bush (HAH get it? That could possibly be a bad innuendo!) my lawn was half seared off by the angry rays of the Florida sun. My father attempted to lay down new grass but apparently forgot halfway through it so now we have a lawn that's half green and half brown. Now he just explains that someday the grass will just "spread out" and revitalize the lawn.

P.S. You know what makes 81 comments a lot harder to read? Like, excessive use of colons and ellipses.

Maybe he's got a blog like "what not to knit" or "you knit what!?!" only his is called "How not to garden" ??? Maybe??

You must beat him severely about the head and shoulders untill he stops butchering plants.

Sit him down and let him watch Edward Scissorhands.

OK, did he take everything off the outsides of the plant? Cuz I agree that a geranium needs to be cut back, but...that picture doesn't show a "cut back", it shows...well, I dont' know what to call it...

Excuse me, I'm just a chick from the far North, jealous that you have stuff blooming at all. I have honestly never seen a geranium that big in my life.

You should have known something was up when you saw him coming with the MACHETE. 8^) Obviously he is simply planning his own obsolescence. Soon there will be nothing left to butcher, and he will be out of work altogether.

I suppose if you like your geraniums really symmetrical he did a good job.

Perhaps he was aiming for the square bush look, given your love of square fruits.

are these YOUR gardening tools? if so, lock the shed/garage. catch him on a break and remove them. He must be stopped.

o.0 That guy is nuts.

If you and LLB can't confront him you may have to chain yourself to the next pretty plant he has his eye on.

"Hell No, Don't Kill My Plants!!"

I used to live in a house that was overgrown by some big a** rhododendrons. They completely obscured the front windows and were all gnarled and twisted around each other. One fall afternoon, I got out my trusty saw and "Francisco'd" those bad boys 'til I had a pile of prunings as big as my minivan. I thought my husband was going to have heart failure when he came home and saw it (he hid my saw for awhile), but come spring those rhodies were covered in blossoms and new growth. So maybe F is just cutting out the deadwood to make way for healthy new growth. Or maybe he is just seriously bored and needs a new hobby. Have you considered introducing him to the insane addiction that is knitting? Maybe some nice green wool and a Brangelina ribbed hat pattern will distract him from the shrubbery. He could even "branch out" into felted flowers.....

Luis was here Monday,and my all ferns are square now.

Poor, poor geraniums. Yet, the bushes behind your garbage can are remniscent of Kramer's hair. Weird. Anyway, we had this gardener last year, George. Everytime he and his guys would come, they'd destroy something we had planted. We have this big planter box in the back that DH planted seeds in. Everytime they'd come by, they'd rip out whatever was just starting to grow and lay it on the ledge of the planter, a lifeless clump of stems and roots. They didn't even have the decency to throw it away. It was like they thought we might want to have a wake for the plants that we had been meticulously caring for.

Oh my gosh. Maybe you should replace any "power tools" that Francisco has with something dull. Sheesh. That man sure has issues.

Hey, you got your trash cans back!

oh lawd, this is so much funnier coz I went thru this exact same thing last week with my gard'ner last weekend!
lololol

I know this was put up yesterday, but I just saw your lovely plants. My landlord hacks up all the nice plants while leavine five foot tall weeds (it has been really rainy up here in NoCal!) and never touches the ugly plants. One time I caught him hacking up my lavendar plant to a stublet. The pile of lavendar was a couple of feet. I inquired about the chain saw look and he said "oh, it will grow back". It's been six years and the stublet is still a stublet. He also did this to my rosemary bush which produced a three foot pile of rosemary branches. I stuck it all in a wicker laundry basket and went around the neighborhood like the fruit vendors in Mary Poppins giving rosemary to ANYBODY who came near me!

I say "they'll grow back" with a slight smirk!

Gotta say this--neither your landlord or you may have any balls , but your landlord has a couple MORE to lose than you, Sweeie! Sounsd like YOU'RE elected to tell him!lol

I got my cans back, and now the blue recycling can has lost a wheel. It's so sad.

I'm afraid to return home this week in case Francisco has come over and done his bidness on my bushes (heh)

I have a bougainvilla with huge pointy spikes that has taken over the back of my house. Send him to Florida, it'll be good for all of us. When you get him back he'll be too weak from heatstroke and blood loss to mess with anything else in your yard.

I think Francisco might need a few days at the Happy Farm. That guy's got issues.....and electric shearer thingies. Not good!

It's my dream to have geranium BUSHES! Every year (once the threat of night frosts has passed and the days are warmer) I plant geranium plants and then encourage them through our often still wet summers. They never grow much past plant stage and then it's our cold wet Fall again.

Francisco needs to be stopped now. Would have taken me more than a large glass of wine to get over that butchering.

RoseM in Canada

Can you circumvent his plans by doing the following:
-planting plastic bushes
-hiding metal pipes in the real bushes so his trimming tool is broken

Good luck with the crazy Lawnmower Man/Edward Scissorhands gardener.

Francisco esta loco. Pinche joto.

geez, this guy has got to go... lol... but then, I suppose the fear could be that if you fired him he'd come back and kill what he hadn't already killed...