It was such a lovely day today that I really couldn't bring myself to spend it in the garage - even though, I am ashamed to say, the Clearing Out The Garage Project has stalled badly in recent weeks.
Instead, I turned my attention to the back garden. In fact, you might say, I went quite potty...
I love our back garden. It's not a fancy garden, with dine-outside-on-a-summer-evening
decking or willow fencing or, indeed, any of the features beloved of TV make-over shows. The most accurate description might be that, like Topsy in Uncle Tom's Cabin, it "just growed." In fact it's grown quite a lot since we moved in
more than a quarter of a centruy ago and the shrubs have completely taken it over. It's as if they have made a silent declaration to remind us that it's their space, not ours.
This troubles
Mr B, who from time to time threatens to start chopping away to restore some order. Occasionally I allow him to undertake some judicious pruning but most of the time, when he starts gazing round the garden with the zeal of a born-again lumberjack in
his eyes, I remind him of the blue bush. Which he killed. On a pruning spree many years ago. Indeed, whenever we see such a bush alive and blooming in someone else's garden, I am wont to murmur, wistfully: "I used to have a blue
bush just like that...."
Two thoughtful former colleagues, who heard this sad story over dinner in our garden earlier this year, bought me a replacement blue bush, one of my absolute favourite
retirement gifts. This is now growing and thriving in the garden along with the rest of the shrubs - and Mr B is not allowed anywhere near it.
Anyway, I digress. The job
I decided to undertake this afternoon was to clear the area once described by my son-in-law as "the graveyard of pots." Considering English is his third, if not fourth language, that man certainly has a way with words. He also had a point
- it was impossible to see one section of the patio which abounded with overgrown, weed-ridden pots of every shape and size.
Not any more, I can report, triumphantly. I have emptied
them all out, cleaned them up, and they are lined up against the wall waiting to be planted up with springtime bulbs. I am turning the graveyard of pots into a nursery. What's more, it turned out that it wasn't
quite such a graveyard after all. Buried deep in several of the pots was a veritable cornucopia of bulbs. I have no idea what they all are so I have simply planted them in hope.
Which is
what gardening is all about, isn't it?