Thursday, Friday

I continued to edge the lawn right down the south facing border.  Near the bottom is perhaps the sunniest part of my garden so I have tried to plant a ‘hot’ border.  It used to be overrun with day lilies, a large orange single flower.  We tried to dig most of it out, but it is a bit like bindweed and grows again from any little root left in the soil.  In fact, this are is overrun with bindweed too!  Every year I resolve to dig out as much as I can to control it, and every year I fail miserably!  On Friday I filled the old washing up bowl I was using for rubbish with the nasty white roots!  I always resolve to keep at it throughout the year but always give up once the plants have grown a bit and I can’t see the bindweed until it is feet in length!

I have 2 pieris bushes in the garden.  I am not sure how they survive so well as my soil is not their favourite!  But they are so lovely in flower and with the red/pink bracts.

Peeking out above the pieris is a crab apple tree, Malus John Downie, that Mum and dad gave us for our 25th wedding anniversary.  It is very late flowering, so the buds are only just about visible yet.   That great heap of ivy is covering a tree stump.  When we moved here there were 5 ash trees at the end of the garden.  They were giants!  Perhaps they were 40 or 50 feet tall.  They shaded the whole garden in the summer and took loads of moisture out of the ground.  Plus they were not very attractive, no spring flowers or pretty buds, and no autumn colour.  They had to go!  We had them taken down about 10 years ago, and I was pleased to notice that the stumps are beginning to rot down now.

It’s hard to believe that this cordeline was once in a little pot on my patio!