Spanish views from a small town

Yesterday afternoon, I tackled a corner of the back garden next to the house. There's a bush there of false jasmine that flowers in May, with fragrant flowers that lead, after a couple of weeks, to the headiness of the orange blossoms nearby. The only problem it has, is that it grows.  Also, there are grape vines my parents planted close to sixty years earlier, after building this house, that grow to form an arbor under which shade we spend pleasant summer evenings. It helps to keep the house cool during heat waves. But the vines sometimes have shoots close to the ground that seem to grow various centimeters per day, until, if you let it go long enough, the arbor seems to be growing from the ground up.  Unfortunately, hidden in the green maze, are brambles. Those pesky little buggers forced stern language from me yesterday. But, even if I did have decent gardening gloves, they are so long, that they hit me all over when I pull out a sucker, making me the sucker. I think I ...

My gardening pet peeve is the branchy, bothersome, beastly bramble. I hate to be pruning something and come upon its thorny stem. Then, I have to follow it down to its base, which is almost always hidden in the middle of a scratchy bush. I cut it, knowing that it will grow back unless I uproot it and the bush I want to save at the same time. I pull it out and destroy half the bush as the bramble drags its thorns along the crying green leaves of the bush, defying me to pull it out. I get half a dozen thorns imbedded in my hands and arms in my attempt to unseat the beastly little suckers. (I can't work with gloves; most are too big and then I have no idea what I'm doing with my hands.) The thorns seem to trigger an allergy because then I am half the day scratching at the itchy hills that are the spots where they scratched me and left a calling card. The problem then is disposal. Generally, I leave them with the branches I've pruned to dry in the sun. Then, they'll eith...