The garden

I’ve just had a brief time spent tidying up the front garden. It seemed a pity to miss the chance of a dry day for once & there are some very dead looking plants that needed sorting out. It’s also a day when I have no food preparation to do as we’re having a sweet chilli prawn stir-fry for dinner. The prawns are out thawing but that’s about all I can do towards the meal.

Today is Green Bin Day i.e. the day when the council comes to collect all recyclable garden & food waste. As a result the green bin was outside on the pavement waiting to be empted. That makes it a shorter walk for me to empty anything I removed from the garden. I was only out for less than half an hour but that was enough to exhaust me.

We’ve decided to see if we can get a different landscaper for our back garden. We suspect the man we’ve seen so far is fine at doing the job of constructing walls, putting in drains etc but he’s not great at design. He needs to be told exactly what wants doing. He would be okay for a small garden, but ours is large. Equally I’m sure he would be good if we were prepared to accept a basic design he could copy from a book, but that’s not what we want. We want something more original, more imaginative, & certainly with wheelchair access in mind. This is too big a job for him & he knows it. That’s why he has been dragging his feet over the design. We just wish he’d said & we could have found someone else earlier.

Unfortunately neither of us are great gardeners. Until we moved here in 2000 we never had a garden to tend. We lived in an upstairs flat. Before that we had the cottage on Leighton Moss but that was a temporary rental, with a garden already gone wild. It wasn’t worth the effort of tidying it. We did once take a scythe to it when the grass grew to eye height but that was it. Now in our 50s & 60s we face this huge back garden which is beyond us as it is now.

We’ve found a local company that has won awards at various flower shows, including Chelsea Flower Show, so we’re going to give them a go. It may cost more but hopefully it will get us a garden we can enjoy for the rest of our lives, something that requires little work to keep tidy & that I can get around on my electric scooter to see & appreciate. Here’s hoping.