“I’m looking for a turtle tail,” I told the nice man at the plant nursery. I told him that because I like messing with people, and also because I was looking for a turtle tail.

“Frogfruit?” he said, hopefully. “Toad lily?”

“Ah! Here we go,” I said, picking up a small boxwood in a four-inch pot. “Ring me up!”

That, he understood.

I needed a turtle tail because I get all excited about a project but don’t plan all that well. In this case I was growing a turtle to go with my salamander topiary in the front yard. I’d had to murder my frog because it wasn’t stout enough to stand up to a load of snow. This was going to be a box turtle, no matter how it turned out. Because it’s made of box.

It’d been growing for a few years and I hadn’t given it much direction until last year. It was almost too late to start turtling it at that point, but I got started, and I was going to give it another year, and if I didn’t think it was going to work, I was going to murder it and plant flowers on its grave, just like I did for the frog.

But it’s looking okay. I’ve got the beak going in the head region and in another year or two it will be sticking out far enough to be respectable. As usual, I have screwed up the legs already. Somehow I have both legs on the right side paddling in the same direction when I’m almost certain one should be forward when the other is rearward, with the opposite thing going on the other side. I remember with the frog at one point I had the right arm coming out of the frog’s head. You have to plant the boxwoods in the right places and frankly they don’t look like much when they’re a few years shy of herpetological glory. When you realize your mistake, you kinda don’t want to replant, because then you’ll have itty bitty limbs and big ones at the same time. On the other hand, salamanders, at least, do regrow limbs, and the new ones aren’t always top-of-the-line. They can be sort of stubby.

Anyway, I’ll worry about the legs another time. Now, I had a tail problem. There isn’t much to a box turtle tail. I thought I could allow a few branches to grow out the rear and shape them into a decent caboose. I even wired a few branches together last year to help things along. But this year it was clear that was not a solution. I had the beginnings of a tail, all right, but it wanted to curl up like a pug dog’s. That is fine for pugs, but in the turtle world, laughable.

So I went to the nursery and bought a new turtle tail and planted it just behind the rest of the turtle. I will need it to grow horizontally both directions and clip it from growing upward. It’s going to take two years probably to look like anything.

I’ve learned a lot about creating things over the years and one of the key strategies is to rename stuff when it doesn’t work out. That’s why a lot of my cooking gets called things like “Turkey Surprise.” Cakes are reborn as “crumbles,” and failed representational art becomes a “collage.” Hell, my entire life might as well be “performance art.”

One of my turtle’s legs is enormous and sort of square, instead of low to the ground and going somewhere. I’m not sure what to do about it yet. In the meantime, I must wait for my tail to get some ambition toward the main corpus. If it doesn’t happen, well. I’ll just say it’s a sculpture and call it “Stumpy Takes A Dump.”