NATCHEZ — The recent cold snap hasn’t been ideal for outdoor activity.

But when The Dart landed on Washington Street, Ruthie Coy and several other family members were taking advantage of a slight warm up to get started on some winter yard work at the family home, Green Leaves.

Coy, along with her nephew Thomas Dickman and great nephew 7-year-old Conner Dickman were pruning crape myrtle trees and cleaning up other debris in the yard.

“We had one (crape myrtle) fall during the hurricane,” Coy said. “And we are just trying to get these others groomed.”

While yearly pruning is a requirement for crape myrtle trees, the yard work going on at Green Leaves wasn’t just yearly maintenance. It was the beginning of a long to-do list necessary to get the antebellum house ready for Spring Pilgrimage.

“There is always something to do with an old home like this one,” Coy said. “One of the big things all the homeowners with brick sidewalks have to do is wash them down with Clorox so none of the tourists slip.”

The timing of the cleanup also coincided with a family gathering that brought several groups of family members to Natchez from out of town.

Visitors included two of Coy’s sisters that were cleaning out a patch of bamboo that had reappeared in the rear of the house.

“We removed it just a couple of years ago, but it came back,” Coy’s sister Aylett Dickman said. “So now we are back pulling it up again.”

Thomas and Conner Dickman traveled, with the rest of their family, to Natchez from their home in Decatur, Ala., to take advantage of the long weekend provided by the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday today.

But it wasn’t exactly a lazy weekend for them.

Dickman, the superintendent at the golf course at Burningtree Country Club in Decatur, was put to work in the yard Saturday because he is the family landscape expert.

“It is just part of my job,” he said.

Coy said having Dickman around when yard work was needed was a great asset for the family.

“He knows how to use the tools and all,” she said. “Whenever he is in town we always have something for him to do.”

But Saturday, Dickman wasn’t having to do the dirty work all alone. His son, Conner was right there ready to lend a hand.

As soon as his dad finished removing a branch, Conner would add it to the pile of branches he had already pulled to the street.

And while Conner seemed more than happy to help out, his dad said that isn’t always the case.

“He’d rather be throwing the football with me,” Dickman said.

But there didn’t seem to be much time for goofing off since Dickman had already finished the crape myrtles and moved on to an area of aspidistra in the yard.

“My mom said she bought just three leaves of this plant and now it has taken over,” Coy said. “It’s almost a pest because it spread so fast.”

And after the aspidistra was cleaned up there was at least one more item on the to-do list — planting some camellia clippings.

The clippings were to be added to the collection of camellia bushes that were planted by Coy’s grandfather in the early 1900s

The clippings were ancient camellias that Coy picked up at a recent meeting of Great American Garden Preservation Alliance.

Ancient camellias refer to camellias that were planted prior to 1900.

“Most of them date back to before 1850,” Coy said.