Alligator land...

I have this unrelenting urge to prune everything.  Right now.  This is how I know when I have spring fever these days, I look at every plant the secretly prune it in my head.
Even the palm trees here in Florida.  It's getting so bad that I wanted to get out of the airboat at the Everglades and get rid of some of the dead cat tails.  The poor gators were surrounded by them!

See, look!

 

The edge of the water is just littered with dead stuff.  

Not as dead as I would have been had I jumped in to clean it up though.  Check out that gator!  Gaaah! 

Meet "Bubba"  

He's a 13 year old 9 foot gator that got so very close to our boat.  We ran into him.  I mean literally, the boat hit the alligator as we were drifting closer to him to get a better look.  He was swimming around us and just didn't get out of the way fast enough, and:

We just grazed him, really.  No damage.  It just scared the living daylights out of him.  And most of the people on the boat.  He was flailing around in the water trying to get away from us.  He rested in the dead junk for a while before making his way back out to the water.  He was a friendly little thing.  We liked Bubba.  We were told to keep all limbs inside the boat so we could take them home with us.  It's really a shame we couldn't pet him.

Here are a few more shots of the beautiful Everglades!

Birdies waiting for the popcorn that our tour guide let us feed them. 

 Vultures waiting to eat something dead.  Sadly though, not the cat tails.

By far the most beautiful bird I have ever seen.  She wanted my potato chips.

 Some crazy men fishing among gators.

 Lovely little flower that grows from those lillypad looking plants called Spatterdock.

 Ah-maze-ing trees all throughout the Everglades.  They are so beautiful!

This airboat trip was unexpectedly the highlight of my trip!  It was so fun to speed along the water and right over the foliage.  The wildlife was spectacular.  We saw fish, gators, and many different kinds of birds and plants I had never seen before.

So now that I have had a taste of spring, a few days in the 70's, I am so ready to go home and start pruning my yard!  The trees need it bad, I think I'll get some profesh help for that.  I can manage the grape vines, roses, shrubs, and maybe some of the smaller tree branches.  Don't worry though, after I get a little advice, I WILL be breaking out the chainsaw for some apple, pear, and cherry tree pruning action!