Adrian Higgins The Washington Post

The trees are callery pears, the escaped offspring of landscape specimens and street trees from the neighborhood. With no gardener to guide them, the spindly wildlings form an impenetrable thicket of dark twigs with three-inch thorns.

Since the Taj Mahal was completed in the mid-1600s, the world's most famous monument to undying love has had to put up with an awful lot of meddling mortals.

Alan Alexander Milne already was a successful writer and dramatist when he decided to write a couple of children's books for and about his young son, Christopher Robin.

The chrysanthemum might be the floral finale of the season, but the gardener has to work hard to make this flower rise to the occasion. Even the most skilled use of forms, colors and combinations with looser companions - grasses, for example - barely fixes the underlying problem.

The trees are callery pears, the escaped offspring of landscape specimens and street trees from the neighborhood. With no gardener to guide them, the spindly wildlings form an impenetrable thicket of dark twigs with three-inch thorns.

Since the Taj Mahal was completed in the mid-1600s, the world's most famous monument to undying love has had to put up with an awful lot of meddling mortals.

Alan Alexander Milne already was a successful writer and dramatist when he decided to write a couple of children's books for and about his young son, Christopher Robin.

The chrysanthemum might be the floral finale of the season, but the gardener has to work hard to make this flower rise to the occasion. Even the most skilled use of forms, colors and combinations with looser companions - grasses, for example - barely fixes the underlying problem.