Aftermath
My campaign against the vegetative refugee from Sleeping Beauty in my garden continues. There is now much less rose, though probably at least as much as I've already taken out, and I have been stabbed in the ball of the left thumb, which I do not expect to be a mortal wound.
There is also this story.
The brambles had died when the prince had awoken the sleeping princess with a kiss. That’s what Gerhardt had been told and he had no reason to disbelieve it. However, Gerhardt was a gardener and his job was to clean up dead brambles.
As opposed to thinning out the palace orchard or finding the ways through the yew and box forest that had once been the formal garden. The head gardener himself was leading a team that was trying to clear out and replant the kitchen gardens, and reportedly finding surprising pockets of vegetable vigour. Gerhardt didn’t know what the royal family was eating, but his meals were featuring a lot of parsley.
Before they’d slept for a century, more or less, the surrounding farms and towns had delivered fresh produce to the kitchen door every day. Part of Gerhardt’s job was to clear a path so those deliveries could resume. Assuming the local farmers knew to resume deliveries. A messenger had been sent out, but Gerhardt hadn’t seen him return.
Even so, the only way in and out of the castle was still path that the prince and his helpers had hacked in, and Gerhardt was working to widening extend it, but there was still a century’s worth of oversized rose debris as well as the newly dead roses to be removed. Gerhardt hadn’t believed the tale that the prince’s groom had told of the quick-branched, carnivorous and vampiric roses that had confronted them on their arrival but, aside from cutting roses up for kindling and small logs, Gerhardt and the two boys helping him had been finding bones. They had provided Father Johan with more work than any of them had expected.
And there were the mosquitoes. Gerhardt had seen the moat, the bit you could see through the dead brambles from the drawbridge over it, and he really didn’t want to know what was going on in there. He feared he was going to find out.
There is also this story.
The brambles had died when the prince had awoken the sleeping princess with a kiss. That’s what Gerhardt had been told and he had no reason to disbelieve it. However, Gerhardt was a gardener and his job was to clean up dead brambles.
As opposed to thinning out the palace orchard or finding the ways through the yew and box forest that had once been the formal garden. The head gardener himself was leading a team that was trying to clear out and replant the kitchen gardens, and reportedly finding surprising pockets of vegetable vigour. Gerhardt didn’t know what the royal family was eating, but his meals were featuring a lot of parsley.
Before they’d slept for a century, more or less, the surrounding farms and towns had delivered fresh produce to the kitchen door every day. Part of Gerhardt’s job was to clear a path so those deliveries could resume. Assuming the local farmers knew to resume deliveries. A messenger had been sent out, but Gerhardt hadn’t seen him return.
Even so, the only way in and out of the castle was still path that the prince and his helpers had hacked in, and Gerhardt was working to widening extend it, but there was still a century’s worth of oversized rose debris as well as the newly dead roses to be removed. Gerhardt hadn’t believed the tale that the prince’s groom had told of the quick-branched, carnivorous and vampiric roses that had confronted them on their arrival but, aside from cutting roses up for kindling and small logs, Gerhardt and the two boys helping him had been finding bones. They had provided Father Johan with more work than any of them had expected.
And there were the mosquitoes. Gerhardt had seen the moat, the bit you could see through the dead brambles from the drawbridge over it, and he really didn’t want to know what was going on in there. He feared he was going to find out.