Gardening

I am not a gardener. I don’t know anything about gardening. Gardening to me is cutting back the green stuff until you can see through it to the other green stuff. Gardening is hard work. Particularly when I’m trying to identify the green stuff that might produce colourful flowers that I can photograph, or that might attract insects and butterflies to the end of my macro lens. I have books on green things, books on flying things and books on both, but still the back garden is full of green stuff that all looks the same.

Yesterday I did the first cut of the front lawn. Lawn is a term used merely so that you know what green stuff I’m cutting. My front garden is an adventure playground for cats. I cut the grass merely so that I can see the cats. Today was the first cut for the back garden. Notice I don’t even bother with ‘lawn’ to describe the back garden. If the front garden is an adventure playground, then the back garden is a full on Royal Marines assault course.

I take no pleasure from gardening (as you may have gathered). Gardening hurts. As I type this, a thorn has punctured my left forefinger and it is bleeding. Yesterday, I managed to drive a larger thorn into the index finger of my right hand, which I had to dig out by rooting around with a suitably sterilised pin. It is still painful, especially when I type. (That is the level of dedication I bring to this blog). My back hurts from strimming. My side hurts from various activities to do with strimming. I have scratches and scrapes. My glasses are covered in bits of grass and other green stuff thrown up by the strimmer. I dare not look at my hair as it is probably the refuge for living things disturbed by the strimmer.

I have an apple tree. It actually produces apples which I share with my friends. I used to have a lot of blackberry bushes but I went to war on all things thorny last year and after an intense and by no means one sided campaign, I have reduced them to a mere blemish against the backdrop of green stuff. There’s a tree at the top of the garden that my dad rescued from a ruined farmhouse as a sapling. The farmhouse once belonged to relatives of my mum. The tree, now more than 30 years old, is magnificent and reminds me of my dad. And it’s not green, so that’s okay.

At the top of the garden is a thick growth of bamboo. I like it (it’s only green at the top)  but I have no idea where it comes from. Next door used to keep birds so it could be from the seed (although the birds were kept in an aviary). I have a suspicion that some Japanese soldiers are hiding in there, not realising that the war is over.

I have the occasional special visitor in my garden. A pair of blackbirds return each year to see what I have left them to nest in. I make a point of stopping all major restructuring work when they arrive. I have had foxes several times, including one that decided to sleep under a bush at the top of the garden and another that had a look in at me through the garden window. That was wonderful to see. I had a hedgehog turn up one evening as I was looking through the telescope. It stopped long enough to let me take its portrait and to feed it some dog food (I checked in the internet and that’s what was recommended). So the garden isn’t all bad.

I have followed a friend’s advice and covered a particularly difficult patch of the garden with old carpet and sheets of wood in an attempt to smother the weeds and brambles that grow there. It’s been on for a couple of months now and the brambles have finally stopped struggling. The odd one still manages to poke it’s head between gaps, but they are swiftly taken care of. It’s unsightly, but I’m thinking for the long term. Besides, it makes a change from the endless green

So that, then, is my garden. A challenging, ever changing, green place.

 

 

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