Water relief and toast

Hooray!  All of those burnt offerings paid off and the notoriously fickle Midwestern weather gods presented us with an inch of rain overnight.  Plants, even many of those that had shown no signs of wilting, definitely look perked up this morning.  Plants that still don't look good are now officially in the category of toast.  One was a new planting, a small conifer, that just declined from the time it was planted.  Another is a male holly bush.  It joins others on the toast list, a nearby yew, a large and ancient one, and a nearby redbud, large and ancient, the latter of which is so close to the neighbor's driveway that it has claimed several rear view mirrors of cars backing out.  This tree is now in the burnt toast category; if we'd known it would have been gone years ago.  Strangely from our perspective this redbud doesn't exist since is lines up with another redbud about 5 feet closer so it all looks like just one tree.  None of these hollies has done particularly well, none of them look very good either, which is another way of getting onto the toast list.  The latest were half a dozen dwarf mock orange shrubs.  They looked so cute in marketing pictures; ours never even came close to looking so good, so they got basally pruned.  Now if you lack a male holly for pollination, then one of the better features of the other hollies, red fruit, will shift from the positive to the negative side of the balance sheet.  The removal of the hollies, the yew, and the redbud will generate some considerable opportunity for new plantings.  Ahhh, you're taking out a redbud (someone always says that).  Well, there are probably another dozen or so around the garden, and yesterday TPP probably removed 50 more seedlings; a redbud removal is not a problem.