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.