On the eve of our daughters' weddings, I gave both of them what I considered to be excellent marital advice: never leave your husband unsupervised   with pruning shears  .  _ I recently let my guard down. Thirty-some years of marriage can do that to a woman. Give a man pruning shears and electric trimmers   and he will give new meaning to "armed and dangerous." One day earlier this year, my husband said that the crab apple tree was dead. "Why do you think it is dead?" I asked. "Look at it. There's not a leaf on it." "There's not a leaf on anything. It's March," I said. "It looked sick last fall and with this bitter winter we had, I'm convinced it's dead." The truth is he's never liked the crab apple. Sure, it has beautiful blooms in the spring, but then it gets a disease, the leaves curl, and it drops those little apples that sit on the driveway. Each passing week he pronounced the tree dead. Eventually I began to believe him. Though he agreed it would be a regrettable loss, there was a twinkle in his eye. He armed himself a couple of weeks ago and began trimming. A branch here, a branch there, a small limb, then a large limb. I watched and then decided to check the wood on some of the branches closer to the trunk. I broke one off and saw green. The crab apple was not dead. It just hadn't had time to leaf out. The tree was now falling to one side, but it was not dead. I would have told him so, but he had moved on to a maple. Once the man starts, he can't stop. One trim leads to another. "Please, stop!" I called. He smiled and nodded, but he couldn't hear because he had started the hedge   trimmers and was getting ready to fix a line of hedges. Zip  , zip, zip. "What do you think?" he shouted. "It's supposed to be a privacy hedge; now all that will be private are our ankles." He started the trimmers again. "Stop!" I called, "Come back!" "Why?" he shouted. "You're in the neighbor's yard." We can learn from the article that the author's husband   _  .
has a great talent for gardening had never used pruning shears before mistook their crab apple tree for a maple tree nearly ruined their neighbor's garden