On a beautifully sunny morning I aimed for the wood beyond the rape field. What, earlier in the year, when the crop was young, I had described as a brassica field, had in fact been sown with rape
which has completely overgrown the public footpath.
I wasn’t about to tackle that in sandals with my dodgy leg.
Another path has been trodden around the edge of the field. I took that one.
Stinging nettles made it rather less inviting in parts.
Today’s ‘bee’ is probably a hoverfly. The disguise of these harmless insects is so deceptive that I can’t always tell the difference.
I eventually made it to the wood and walked down to the stream where I rested on the rails of the wooden bridge, watching overhead foliage flickering in the shallow water, before retracing my steps.
The filtered sunlight dappled the dark, sheltered, path, casting fascinating shadows.
Our own garden now being less overgrown, we can appreciate our antirrhinum snapdragons,
and the rose Compassion.
The rest of the day was jointly occupied in weeding and planting. Sometimes I wonder if the necessity of eradicating unwelcome flowers has come about purely to make space for the trays of the more acceptable bargains that are brought back from garden centres every time Jackie ‘pops out for compost’. When my Dad ‘popped out for some cigarettes’, you would not see him for an hour or so. So it is with Jackie and compost. When I ran out of weedkiller whilst treating the future rose garden, there were, it being a Sunday, just ten minutes to closing time at Otter Nurseries. I thought I might escape by being able to finish the task tomorrow, but she volunteered to go and buy some immediately. As she said when she returned very soon afterwards, that must have been her quickest ever trip to a garden centre.
This evening we dined on garlicky chicken Kiev, creamy mashed potatoes, roasted peppers and mushrooms, crisp green beans, and pure white cauliflower. Jackie drank her customary amber beer in the form of Hoegaarden, whilst my red wine was a little more of the chianti.