Sometimes gardeners have to say "uncle!"

You'd think folks with the perseverance to pull dozens of wisteria like these out of the ground 

could transplant one old flowering quince. 

Friday after lunch.

Wendell, "let's take out the wisteria, smilax and cherry laurel bushes around the magnolia tree as far as the camellia."

Meg, when we got to the quince, "looks to me like it'd be easier to transplant the flowering quince than to pull out all the wisteria that's growin IN the shrub. Besides, the magnolia is shading it. See how it's growing into the tree to get light?"

So we trimmed the top, pulled and dug (puller bear, mattock, shovel). We sawed off four inch wide roots. 

Our reward- we split off two quince. We quit for the day; two hours was enough at this when we could start again Saturday morning. We filled the hole in so the roots wouldn't freeze. 

I woke up with a back ache so I was relegated to watching, cheering and walking the scraps to the burn pile. 

This time Wendell brought a small pointed hand spade and an iron pole his father had  used to find plumbing pipes in the ground. He continued digging for another two hours until he was down to the orange clay subsoil.  Still the quince wouldn't even rock back and forth. In the thirty odd years the tree had grown next to the ancient quince, magnolia roots had grown through the quince roots which grew down, around and under. 

Saturday afternoon.

Meg, "Remember when we started this I said it'd be easier to dig up the quince? I've been proven wrong. Its more like we'd have to dig up the magnolia to move the quince. And since the original goal was taking out wisteria, which you did, its time to say,'uncle!' and fill in the hole. "

Wendell, "After I do that I'm going to dig up some more wisteria and smilax just so I can quit and feel like I've actually done something. But at least we've learned how to tell flowering quince roots; they're as red as the flowers."

And he was right.