Spent Friday in my Dad’s garden, a million miles from my home. Fortunately his garden shed is stacked out with tools that have performed well in my years of product testing, though I have to admit there were plenty of gaps that still need filling.
His garden is quite small, well compared to mine anyway and is punctuated in the corners with some enormous trees that were planted almost thirty years ago when my parents first moved there. I cringe a bit when I look at them now and feel wholly responsible that they made such odd choices, but I was just a teenager then and although I was interested in gardening, I knew little and had even less powers of choice than I do now. But I digress.
The garden is now ‘maintained’ by a ‘gardener’ who comes and cuts the moss and a bit of grass once or twice a month. He’d done an OK job on the roses, so I just neatened them up a little; they too must be nearly 30 years old and are looking surprisingly good. Then I pruned back the dead leaves on the few herbaceous plants that season the plot and pruned back the perovskia that was mimicking a barbed wired barrier across the path. I dug up and divided a couple of congested clumps of snowdrops and replanted them in places where they could be seen from the house, so that next year the display will be much better. It’s a good time to do this and something I need to do in my own garden too.
Then with the help of a Felco Pruning saw, I made short work of removing the new and 3-4 year old rods of hazel now reaching skyward along one side of the fence. I had my eye on them for next year’s kindling at home, but then it started to rain very heavily and the thought of having to saw them up and fit them into my little car in the rain settled the matter. I suggested they were used for a runner bean wigwam this summer to support some fresh beans, but for some reason that didn’t seem to inspire. Surprising really as we used to have an allotment when I was a child and grew tons of beans every year. Maybe that’s why I’m such a fan of them.
