Taking advantage of our good fortune in having such a long, dry, summer extending well into September, we worked on the garden again today. I continued pruning and removing foliage from the empty house side of our back drive, whilst Jackie dealt similarly with the last of the lonicera to the side of the house in the front.
The section on which I worked revealed the familiar hotchpotch of rotting fencing supplemented by all kinds of interesting material in metal or plastic. It also exposed a line of stumps standing like sentinels along the drive.
By lunchtime, I had reached the first bonfire, roughly half-way. Afterwards I continued as far as the second fire which we weren’t using today. It was music to my ears at this point to hear the trickling of the water feature in the garden of the residential care home on the corner of Downton Lane. As I stripped ivy from a tree trunk I could see that the overgrown vegetation was now on our side only, because the staff of this property maintained their garden.
The parasitic growths that were choking the death out of the stumps of the row of trees felled long ago, gave the impression that their hosts had become regenerated. I half expected them, like Tolkien’s Ents, to lumber cumbersomely towards me. It took an hour to free the tree in these photographs of its hair-do.
Naturally, we kept our fire going all day, and just as the sun was thinking about making its way a little further West to bed for the night, the last of the lonicera lingered in the flames.
Jackie was still working on tidying her bed.
As she raked up plants she had cut down, she came across a rather disgruntled hedgehog settling down for the winter amongst a pile of leaves. Naturally, she tucked him in again.
This evening we dined on excellent cod, chips, peas, and onion rings at The Royal Oak. Jackie’s dessert was chocolate fudge cake, and mine was fruits of the forest cheesecake. She drank Peroni and i drank Doom Bar.
Hibernation
