Going wild

I don’t remember when I last sat out in the garden in the evening, reading as the light faded. I did tonight. It’s summer and we’ve had a run of summery weather, an although our garden is still a mess, it is improving. We’ve been wroking quite hard, but not ridiculously so that we get annoyed, fed, up disheartened. We’re trying to do things little by littel, and having small successes along the way.

I mentioned some time ago that our garden got completely out of hand. We had a couple of summers of poor weather where the weeds grew like fury, and I’m sure we have an underground stream beneath the lawn as it never is anything other than lush and green, ditto weeds. We lost heart, had other things to do except the bare necessities to stop it becoming a complete wilderness. We’d had raised beds which went wild, and then the planks rotted, a hedge went mad and became overrun with brambles, ivy, climbing, creeping things and to be honest we felt somewhat in despair.

Then we had a brainwave. Turn the raised beds into small areas of wild flower lawns, turn the other flower beds back to ordinary lawn, just tidy it up and make it bearable – and nice to be in. We bit the bullet and paid some local firms first to clear teh brambly hedge, then to put up new fencing, and now bit by bit we’re trying to bring some order. The first raised bed has gone and now has the beginnings of a wild flower area (but how do we tell the difference between the wild flowers we’ve planted and the naughty weedy things which take over? We bought grass seed mixed with wild flower seed…)

There’s a long way to go, and any visitor would think it a terrible mess, but at least we feel in control again. We had another brainwave this evening as admired our invisible work. We could also have part of the back lawn as a wild flower area – mown paths to walk across to the summer house, round the washing line and along the edges of the paths, and a small area for Reg the dog as he doesn’t like long grass. We hope we will be able to keep it under control better, we hope the bees, birds and other creatures will enjoy it, and we hope it will seem less of a burden to us! At some point, I hope I’ll share some photos!