Will someone give me a shout if it ever stops raining?
Then I'll go outside and scrape all the battered, rotting plants off the floor and think about starting again next year.
And I think one of my dogs is lost in the grass.
Seriously. I refuse to wear wellies in August. It's against the law.
Just as this blog threatened to disappear under a blanket of weeds while I coughed and slept and coughed some more, I got tagged! By Victoria at Victoria's Backyard. Thanks Victoria, you brought me out of hibernation.
Here's how it goes:
* Link to the person who tagged you.
* Post the rules on the blog.
* Write six random things about yourself.
* Tag six people at the end of your post.
* Let each person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.
* Let the tagger know when your entry is up.
Six Random Things About Me:
1) I have three tattoos, two of which I'd have removed if I was a billionaire. They're not offensive, nor do they say,"I heart Monty Don" or anything (although I totally do), I just...y'know...could do without them. Especially as the last ten years has seen the one on my shoulder become the one just below my shoulder blade. How does that happen???
2) I have synesthesia. This is at the front of my mind because I was just reading about it. I have the conceptual variety and see things like numbers, dates and letters as having a place in a 3D pattern. I also feel that inanimate objects have feelings that can be hurt which causes me all sorts of problems (and near constant guilt!) but at least I now know I'm not losing my tiny mind. It's just the synesthesia. Apparently, 1 in 23 people have it. You too?
3)I can tap dance.
4)I am a cult TV saddo. Buffy, Angel (we're not worthy), Firefly, Lost, Heroes, Dr Who, Torchwood, Smallville...I'm there in front of the DVD.
5)I want to live in Amsterdam and I'm not really sure why.
6)I adopted my daughter in China in 2006. She is the light of my life and the most wonderful child in the world. It actually says that on her passport. Honest. Hi sweetie!
Okay...I hereby tag:
Karen at An Artist's Garden
Gillian at Within the Walled Garden
Paul and Melanie at Growing Our Own
Clare at Pumpkin Soup
Katie at Garden Punks
Nat at Our Pint-Sized Veg Plot
I'm only halfway through building the wildlife tower but on a good day the two existing layers look like this:
More often, I'm finding they mysteriously look like this:
Hmm. I called Angel Investigations and they did some surveillance for me. We've got three small, demonic suspects.
Something tells me the answer's staring me in the face. Or rather, it isn't.
Before I moved here, C let the "garden" do what it wanted. He liked it that way. So it had knee-high grass and weeds. In fact, the first time I came over, there was a weed that reached my shoulders just next to the front door.
This house is on an estate. On a corner. The other houses have the classic, manicured lawns and pots of petunias alongside a hanging basket or two. Or they've given up on the dreadful, stoney ground we have here and just covered their little patch of land in gravel. Oh the irony.
C would get regular visits from his neighbours asking him to do something about his garden because he was making the area look a mess. Heh. He really was. But he doesn't do gardening and as I mentioned, he liked it that way. Fair enough.
Now our garden is tended and mown and planted but it's still quite rough around the edges because we both like it that way. Also, the stoney ground is worst of all on our corner where it's aided and abetted by dumped hardcore left by the builders about six inches down. The concrete from the pavement slopes down under our border so you can't put a spade in either.
Still...I pulled up the rotten old plants that were there and installed vast amounts of lavender. There are poppies, chives, a raspberry bush, a small black cherry tree, some geraniums and various other bits and pieces. Along the side of the house is a stretch of lawn that just gets used by the world and his wife and his dog as a piece of common ground. I especially love it when drunks smash bottles against our garden wall and leave shattered glass in the grass. (Not that we have a lot of drunks, but it has happened a couple of times.) All I do is mow it and leave it. The surface stones make it impossible to get close into the house so there are banks of weeds and brave flowers that have crawled around the corner to explore.
This year I decided to leave a small block of it unmown. There is tall clover and grasses and all sorts of things I can't name. Mostly "weeds". It's beautiful. Yesterday, mowing the rest after recent rain had sent it shooting up, I thought I'd try mowing a path through the overgrown part so that it was clear we'd done it on purpose. And now E has A Magic Path and it's sweet and it'll get better as it gets taller. I'm hoping that the schoolkids will use it too on their way past in the mornings and afternoons. Drunks, not so much.
Also out front is a sage bush that was a tiny kitchen plant when I stuck it in the ground rather than dump it. To say it has flourished is an understatement. I cut it back and cut it back and it throws out the most glorious purple spires that bees just adore. Yesterday you could hear that bush buzzing from yards away. I snapped away with my little camera and got a cool picture of a bee with its proboscis reaching out for some sagey goodness.
I have this thing that C doesn't understand. Despite being a country girl at heart, I do love being in urban settings. Or even better, slightly tatty, surburban settings. I discovered this about myself around 15 years ago while sitting in a car, waiting for a friend, in a rain-soaked car park outside a shabby, small town clinic on a winter's day.
With nothing around me but concrete and grime I was suddenly hit with a heightened perception of my own, er, life force? I was incredibly aware of my pulse, my body warmth and my "aliveness". My organic self. I felt like some kind of pulsating alien and it was amazing. And that's why I love being around cold, hard, grotty buildings - they make me feel alive.
This has recently developed into something of an obsession with the way nature reclaims such spaces. Or at least moves in and shares them. So I've decided to start taking pictures of it. Specifically, plants growing in car parks!
This first set is from my office car park. As you will see, we're as relaxed about its upkeep as we are about everything else! But I love it. Here I am amongst fellow aliens but while I only visit, they've re-colonised.
So...a slight side-step from the garden:
Other People's Gardens. In this case, Nana and Papa's. If E picks up 0.005% of what her Papa knows about gardening, she's going to be teaching me lessons before she's three.
This morning I mulched the new beds. I know the usual primary reason for doing this is to keep weeds at bay, but for me it's that it saves me watering quite so much and therefore, it saves water. Once it's rotted down a bit it looks more natural but for now it just looks very dark and tidy.
Also...a certain small person thinks it's a huge gift from the Snack God. Sigh. Every year the same...
Here's some more photos from today, including this little chap availing himself of the bird bath, now The Bee Bath. Perhaps a visitor from The Collective?
A whole new bed full of plants that were given me from work colleagues. Wonderful. In fact most of them are from a woman who is soon leaving. Now I'll remember her whenever I look at this bed.
The curiosity of a two year old knows no bounds other than the energy and commitment of her parents. So this sunday morning, instead of lying around reading yesterday's papers and drinking homemade soya latte (how do you stop the soya milk from separating?), I took E out in the garden and "did stuff".
It wasn't entirely altruistic, I was hoping she'd burn off some energy and I'd get some time to read that paper while she napped (that didn't work out), but as ever, we ended up having great fun. It's such a gift to be shown a garden through the eyes of a small child.
First of all, there were birdbaths to top up. The littler one has to have pebbles in so that bugs can get out and also it looks nice. She says.
There were nasturtiums to check on; stones to examine; red ants to uncover (and stay away from) and best of all, wheelbarrow wheels to spin!
We had a look at the composter and talked about how our food makes food for the soil; the soil makes food for plants; the plants make food for bugs and bugs make food for birds. And she had a quick chat with the "wooden lice" family. Heh. I think one of them waved back while the camera was off.
Then there was the snail. I didn't think E would want to go near it but she was fascinated. And who wouldn't be? Snails are so...so...'Other'. Little aliens who aren't alien.
Then we had a look at our unfurnished wildlife tower. E decided which floor should be "the livin' woom" and set about furnishing it with straw. I love the expression on her face as she worked - she took such care.
Water, earth, straw, plants and insect life. And all before 10 o'clock in the morning. Who needs the newspapers? There's a world in our back garden and my favourite Wild Thing is who I want to be with. That's what I learnt today. Thanks E.
