MISQUAH — The annual cleanup of the memorial garden beside First Lutheran is set for Thursday morning, the cemetery association announced, ahead of Memorial Day weekend, and volunteers are asked to bring gloves, buckets, and “their own certainty about what is a weed,” the last item being, by long experience, the one in shortest supply.

The garden — a modest plot of perennials and a flagpole at the cemetery’s edge, tended by volunteers and dedicated to the town’s veterans — requires a spring grooming before the Memorial Day program, and the grooming requires, each year, a quiet reckoning over which green things growing in it are flowers and which are not. “Everybody’s an expert until they’re standing over a sprout they can’t name,” said one longtime volunteer. “We’ve pulled flowers thinking they were weeds, and we’ve nursed weeds thinking they were flowers, and the garden has forgiven us both, which is more than some gardeners deserve.”

The association brings the coffee and the larger tools; volunteers bring the labor and the opinions. The work is expected to take the morning, longer if the debate over the bed nearest the flagpole resumes, “which it will,” the volunteer predicted, “because it always does, and because the woman who knows for certain what’s planted there has, sadly, passed, and took the knowledge with her.”

The cleaned garden will anchor the Memorial Day program Monday, weather permitting and, the association noted, “weather around here not generally permitting on the first try.” New volunteers are welcome and need bring no expertise, only a willingness to defer, when in doubt, to whoever sounds most sure — “which is how the garden has always been weeded,” the volunteer said, “and it’s still here, so something’s working.”