I get out to the garden as quickly as I can, put Jamie’s weed whacker to use. As I’m finishing the job I started two weeks ago, Sally walks past, stops for a chat. I tell her my vision for raised beds for veg at one end, and a sitting area with flowers at the other. With the sun shining I can almost imagine it happening. She asks if I think I’ll be able to get vegetables in this summer. Let’s be practical, I think, how long is my vision going to take to become a reality? Well, I say, I think I may have to resort to grow bags for this summer if I’m going to have any hope of tomatoes or any other summer fruit or veg.
I know grow bags will work, because, when my friend Ben and I moved into our house in Walthamstow we were compelled to use them after discovering that what we thought were flower borders around the paved garden actually consisted of an inch of mulch on top of an inch of sand on top of concrete.
It’s amazing what we were able to grow in pots and grow bags in Walthamstow.
Sally wishes me luck and heads up her drive. I get back to whacking weeds. When I make as far as the area I’d once carved out for flowering shrubs I make an astonishing discovery: hidden in the knee high weeds is what I’m 99% certain is my lilac tree and it’s still alive! It was four foot high when I left and is now barely one foot tall, but surely it’s my lilac tree. I call across the road to Pat, who’s also taking advantage of this probably brief period of sunshine to do some work on his garden, ask him to come over and give me his opinion on something. Yes, he says, it’s a lilac, although the deer have been at it, nibbling it down from the top. Never mind. It’s alive and that’s what counts. It makes me ridiculously happy that something – anything – from my earlier gardening efforts has survived.
Tangled up in honeysuckle and undergrowth on the other side of the fence is what’s left of the roll of fence wire I bought years ago. Some of this can be used to to surround and protect the lilac. Also unearthed in the weed whacking of this area is one of several rose bushes I’d planted, struggling to survive. It’s pretty sad looking, but undeniably has leaves on it and, again, I’m disproportionately cheered by its existence.
Elsewhere, the weed whacking confirms my suspicion that the rhododendron planted to mark the grave of my crazy, much loved cat Clancy is as dead as he has been for many years. I honestly cannot face the prospect of digging there to plant another shrub, lest I accidentally dig down as far as his remains. I decide a small rock garden (heaven knows there are enough rocks in the garden for the job) will replace the rhododendron.
I finish the weed whacking, borrow Pat’s rake (mine, having disappeared along with all my other garden tools) and make some more progress. Then I go into the house to try to find the wire cutters. Unlike the gardening tools, the wire cutters are where I left them in the bottom drawer in the kitchen.
I make a protective cage for the lilac, deciding not to bother with the rose bush you can almost (if you try very hard) see beside struggling for survival on the right.
Then I dig out my gardening gloves and apply the not terribly useful for the job wire cutters (my secateurs having also disappeared) to pruning back the blackberry shrub.
When Pat and I originally put the fence posts and wire fencing in, we used the end of the roll to close off the opening to the garden. That was fairly soon afterwards replaced by a proper (of sorts) gate – the one Tom, our handyman and mate, had taken down from his own property to replace with something higher and more deer-proof. Tom’s old gate, left open at some point and warped beyond repair by the elements, is, as previously stated, no longer functional on any level.
However, I do still have enough fencing on the roll to revert to the original deer barrier, so I set to it with the wire cutters, unrolling enough to close off the garden. Hurrah, hurrah, hurbloodyrah! Who cares if I have bleeding cuts on my fingers? (Was it the blackberry thorns or the wire, I vaguely wonder?)I have accomplished more in the past two hours than in the past two weeks. The job is so far from done that it really doesn’t bear thinking about, but – and this is an enormous but – what I now have is something which might actually be mistaken for a garden, rather than a semi-fenced in jungle on the corner of my property.
Next job is clearing enough of the undergrowth near the “gate” to relocate the compost box. It needs to be moved anyway to make room for the raised beds (whenever that happens), but it will also be a pain (possibly literally) having to undo and reattach the wire every time I want to throw peelings in.
After that, I need to dig up all the remaining weeds around the lilac “tree” and rose “bush”, to return it to looking like an actual bed. God, I can’t wait.
Still, I haven’t had breakfast yet and I’ve been at work in the garden for two hours. Time to go inside and have something to eat.
What’s this? Oh, no, it’s clouding over! Before I can finish my coffee and muffin it’s bloody raining again. Damn, damn, damn.
In two days Mike and I are going to Vancouver for 10 days (doctor’s appointments, his granddaughter’s fourth birthday party and for me a piss up in the wonderful WISE Club (where you can still have a pint and a fag indoors) with my old mate Jane who’s visiting from Montreal. Lovely chubbly, but if it doesn’t stop bloody raining in the next couple of days it will be a fortnight before I can get anything else done.
Bollocks.
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