Garden Tidy

 I was thinking this week about the assumptions I made in my fifties about the gardens of those in their seventies and eighties. How easy it is to use those little words 'let go' with a limited understanding of the circumstances.

Once, in the warm South East, we used to supplement our income and offer gardening services to pensioners.  This was usually a happy experience as we, by which I mean my husband with self as 'gaffer's assistant', cut back, mowed lawns, prised weeds out of pavers, pulled self-seeded trees, trimmed lavender bushes, strimmed lawn edges, dead-headed roses, grubbed up invasive ivy and any other such tasks that we could complete within two hours with the kit we possessed and a 1999 hatchback (still on the road) to transport it.

In two afternoons of two hours blessed with sunny intervals I managed a very minimal garden tidy of my own.  I cut down half of the self-seeded Jerusalem Artichokes which have been annually waving outside the patio windows, and dug up as many artichokes as I could find.  I tidied up dead leaves of Lily of the Valley, I moved (carefully) containerised fruit bushes and strawberries to cover the gaps left when I moved the pelargoniums indoors and I uprooted, with some effort two rogue and previously unnoticed sycamore seedlings.

I hope I will be able to keep our garden tidy.  I do not want a lawn that has spread into a herbacious border denuded of everything except daylilies.  I do not want rogue sycamores or ivy that has self-seeded into the patio or the buttercup that has crept from a crack by the fence or couch grass with white roots.  

It was hard work.  I finished it without the gentle and grateful chat of an older customer.  Also I had to make my own coffee and biscuits.

Apple Thieves

It has now rained consistently for several weeks and our apples have been gathered and are safely stored.  But it has been a fight this year.

Firstly, after my husband's heart attack, we cancelled the gardener who was due to prune our two trees.  They grew tall and unchecked.  But their roots are deep and in this season of drought they bore fruit.

In the circumstances we didn't refill our codling moth trap.  Codling moths struck for almost the first time I can recall in eleven years. Some apples ripened early and fell from the trees with the telltale rot and hole that indicates a horrid little grub has been resident in the core.

'Beaky' our blackbird of the fourth or fifth generation demonstrated his appetite for ripe Discovery and pecked a hole in fruit within reach.  To my dismay he was copied by the magpies and even the jackdaws who roost among the chimneys of the house at the end. 

Squirrel (m or f) decided it would be fun to climb a tree, detach an apple from the branch and eat it on the shed roof.

Wasps fed on the windfalls that I could not reach beneath the unpruned branches.

Hedgehog visited, I presume, also to benefit from fallen fruit.

In the autumn I put out apples by our front drive for the neighbours.  This is usually well received. 

One night I left some cooking apples in a new and clean washing up bowl.  My husband heard the remarks through the window which was slightly ajar.  His hearing is better than mine.  In the morning the bowl and the apples were gone.  

Take the fruit but leave the receptacle is my unspoken convention for free food.  I am not sure that I want to do this again. 

Geraniums October 2026

This week I took in the geraniums (pelargoniums) from our back patio.  It was time to overwinter them indoors.

As I did so I remembered selecting geraniums to give to the nursing home where my husband was waiting to return home after his stroke.   In April we planted together, from the wheelchair, left-handedly, into the planters in the sunny garden there.  We promised to return and visit.  Maybe we will go back and see how many plants survived the drought before the sodden autumn weather took hold.

I recalled moving and rearranging geraniums on our own patio too.  I deconstructed my husband's home-made plant stand for herbs and moved the plants across to a corner by the back door.  I then took the geraniums outside.  At that stage I thought we could place the small ramp for the wheelchair at the back patio doors.  The second patio door proved recalcitrant and the ramp itself too small, the angle too steep.  I rearranged the geraniums again.

Shortly afterwards we were given a longer ramp. Single-handedly, with a cold chisel, fuelled by the euphoria of returning home and once again from the wheelchair, my husband demolished a strawberry planter constructed from old decking to give the ramp an adequate 'runway' up to the back door.  I replanted strawberries at the wrong time of year (April/May) as they came into flower in one of this year's prolonged periods of dry weather.  They did fruit and survive and now look as though they were always intended for two permanent raised beds next to the shed; beds where my husband had buried kitchen compost before his heart attack.  

As often happens we still had too many geraniums, so we gave a plant to a kind neighbour who was somewhat surprised by its large size and reciprocated with fruit cake.  

They are going to need tidying up, picking over and ridding of caterpillars - surprising they do infest geraniums - in the days ahead.  Our back patio room has taken on its winter aspect.  Some things remain constant.