poliphilo

I've become terribly suburban. I stand at the bedroom window and compare our back garden with what I can see of the gardens around it- and wish ours was in as developed a state. Ailz comforts me by pointing out that Alison and Peter next door have had 20 years to get their garden into shape whereas we- building on nothing very much- have had three months.

One thing our garden has that is special is a wiggly path that goes across the lawn to the sheds at the far end. The wiggle serves no purpose save that of prettiness.

(Hogarth would have called it the "curve of beauty")

Also we have poppies- field poppies and opium poppies. They're magnificent. In an early fit of enthusiasm- not knowing what might be planted in what looked like nothing more than a weedy corner- I nearly dug them up, but it was hard work and I stopped with the job half done. And the moral of the story is "wait and see."

One of our earliest purchases was a hawthorn tree- bare-rooted. It cost a lot of money. It arrived looking like a stick- and it is still nothing but a stick. Everyday I go look to see if there's any sign of it bursting into leaf- but nada. We bought gorse bushes from the same seller and they are doing rather better. If this story has a moral I suppose it must be "caveat emptor"

I compare gardening notes with Mike. He and Su moved to a new property a little before we did. Their garden was concreted over, but they've just had the concrete broken up and taken away to be replaced with eleven tons (eleven tons!) of topsoil. I'm almost as interested in their garden as I am in ours...