The Bill 2

Just came home from Waitrose*

to find an armed police raid in full swing next door.

Not what one expects.

And to think, only hours earlier

I had been sitting on the swing seat with a Magnum.

By which I mean one of these

lest there be any confusion in your minds.

I was reminded of the joke about the Peter Jones*

department store being where you should go in the event

of a nuclear attack, as nothing bad can ever happen there.

Surely I couldn't be expected to unpack Waitrose hummus

with plain clothes officers swarming about the place.

This must qualify me for inclusion here.

* Peter Jones and Waitrose are operated by the John Lewis Partnership

Something you may not know about me

Some people like shopping for clothes,

some people like shopping for shoes.

Let me loose in a specialist horticultural, arboricultural and forestry outlet

on an out of the way light industrial estate

and I'm in my element.

Admittedly I have to dust off my Blokeish,

but look what I got.

It's an extendable pole lopper with a twelve foot reach.

Just the job.

Here's where it all started.

Or perhaps it lurks even further back in the blood.

My maternal grandfather (after a stint as a teenager, opal mining in Australia)

studied forestry in Germany and then joined the Indian Forestry Service

and served at Chatrapur, Berhampore and Parlikimedia

in the north of Madras Presidency.
Me, I'm controlling brambles, ash and sycamores
in the south of England Residency.

A King's Ramson

More than enough for three jars of wild garlic pesto.

For Vieuxtemps' sake

These flowers for Avis

and this clip of Menuhin playing with what was to be 
her orchestra, almost exactly 60 years before her birth.

Another stray coin

The best of England, thought Mrs Miniver,

as opposed to countries with reasonable climates,

is that it is not only once a year that you can say,

"This is the first day of spring."

Today was one of those days

when the sun shone a little more warmly,

the birds sang a little more sweetly

and even the garden of doom 

had snowdrops and crocuses

to show off.

While it lasted that day had been part of 

the authentic currency of spring -

a stray coin tossed down carelessly on account.

The Bill

I was just getting one of Nigel Slater's double ginger cakes 

out of the oven when 

there was a sharp rapping at my front door.

A neighbour, I was told, had called the police 

because she saw two men in the garden
on the other side of the fence

'who shouldn't be there'.

Radio crackling he hot-footed out to my garden

and peered over the fence.

I saw snowdrops and crocuses

where once there were brambles.

A police helicopter arrived and

wheeled in tight circles overhead.

Dog handlers raced up the alleyway.

Then suddenly, the show was over.

Apparently everything was just fine.

The men who shouldn't be there,

 live in the house.

I doubt that they were gardening

and there may be more to this than meets the eye

but I wasn't being told.

I was complemented on my hall wallpaper.

They apologised for the mud on 
the newly-washed floor and departed.

The cake had cooled,

so I cut myself a slice 
and had it with a nice cup of tea.

News from next door

A gang arrived and set to with chain saw and strimmer

in next door's garden of doom.

I begged them to leave the peach tree.

They left the toys too.

It looks utterly desolate.

I know that the brambles and saplings

will be back.

It is a very temporary measure

because no one is ever going to nurture that garden.

Rude awakening

What would you rank as the worst possible noise

that could wake you in the small hours of the morning

in peace time?

A car crash? Heart stopping.

A child crying? Heart sinking.

A fight? Frightening. 

A battering ram? We heard that once next door.

Well last night at 1.15

it was a chain saw and an industrial tree shredder,

 right outside our house, but

we couldn't see which, or more pertinently

whose, tree they were cutting down.

It turned out they had been summoned to do the work

by the police because a dead tree had snapped

and fallen across the road.

Some of it fell towards the house next door

and now blocks their exit.

The remaining trunk is in urgent need of removal.

Judging by the neglectfulness of the landlord

this is unlikely to happen anytime soon.


Postscript. I was wrong. It has been removed, 
but only as far as the front garden.
They butchered a lovely damson for good measure too.
So much easier than taking the ivy off it.

Regime change

I didn't plant these in the tulip tubs.

They staged an audacious coup.

Vacuuming pine cones

I had come indoors defeated by the sight of a new slew of debris

dumped

in next door's front garden.

I just couldn't quite face picking it all up again

so soon

but as the house is now empty,

no one else is going to do it.

It was then that I noticed 

the cobwebs on the pine cones

in one of my little arrangements.

You know the sort of thing.

A bowl of pebbles

lovingly collected on the shore last summer,

covered in dust.

A basket of shells, ditto.

 Colourful marbles

joined by buttons, a plectrum, a paperclip, a screw,

some loose change, a receipt and a blob of Blu-tack.

All quite charming when first displayed

but silently deteriorating

into a miniature replica of the mess outside.

So I got out the vacuum cleaner

and vacuumed the pine cones,

isolated and rinsed the marbles,

washed the shells,

and the pottery fragments

that you find so thrillingly in the garden.

And then I went back and rescued

this bunch of fake flowers

because I think I know someone who would like them.

Bad, sad, lad, glad

Bad.

The state of next door's garden.

Sad.

A small child's toys,

hurled from an upstairs window

and never retrieved.

Lad.

Doing his best to repair the fence.

Glad,

that I've seen their peach tree blossoming.

Guerilla gardening with Vita

The time for sowing seeds of hardy annuals is approaching.

They can all be sown outdoors towards the middle or end 

of this half-way March month

when an occasional spring-like day deludes us into a belief that winter is over -

poor optimistic us!

...I would like to suggest that we might all go a bit bold and 
enterprising and altruistic this year,

strewing our seeds all over the place, not only in our own prepared flower beds, but also over such waste places as railway embankments, ruined castles, bomb-sites, and even along the hedgerows of our country lanes.

Years ago, I read a book by Maurice Hewlett. 
It was called Rest Harrow.

It was about a man who went walking all over the country, 

sowing seeds broadcast.

I have forgotten the detail of it, 

but I know it made a deep impression on me at the time,

and I determined that if ever I got the chance

I would go walking around, scattering seeds in handfuls, 
which might, or might not, come up.

It was a youthful dream; but now that I am much, much older, 

and much more sadly experienced,

I still believe that we might beautify the countryside by such rash sowings.

From Vita Sackville-West's Garden Book

taken from her weekly gardening column in the Observer newspaper.

Painting The Sower by Vincent Van Gogh.

The other side of the fence 2

I cleared this patch last year.

I'm so glad I did.

I had forgotten about the snowdrops.
Beauty among the weeds.

Each peach, pear, plum

This has been a good year for the old pear tree.

It overhangs our fence

and drops large hard green pears into our garden.

A fair exchange for all the weeds I think.

We planted a Victoria plum and it has just started to crop in the last couple of years.

A glut for us is a dozen plums.

But this - we never expected.

When I was ready to call it a day on the other side of the fence,

I glimpsed three fuzzy pale yellow fruits

hanging from a feeble little tree.

It hardly seems possible, but in that dank, east facing,

weed infested garden

in England,

a peach tree has grown.

Just like that.

The other side of the fence

Our house has an identical twin next door,

except that it has been divided into four flats.

They are occupied by busy and somewhat transient people,

and in the sixteen years we have lived here,

only one elderly gent was at all interested in the garden.

He expended quite a lot of effort trying, and largely succeeding,

in killing a row of lime trees on the far boundary.

He also grew sweetcorn.

Over the years the large garden has become inundated by brambles,

bindweed and self sown ash trees,

and these are now making strenuous efforts to colonise our garden.

The brambles vault over the flimsy falling-down fence,

the bindweed lassoes itself into our trees,

and ash tree seedlings become sturdy saplings overnight.

So yesterday I climbed through a gap

at the end of the garden behind an old air raid shelter

and surveyed the scene from the other side of the fence

and then I started hacking.

I freed this bench under a choked magnolia tree

which used to be underplanted with crocuses in Spring.

I discovered an old greenhouse with a yew tree growing inside it.

I picked a few blackberries

and eyed up this elderberry for possible wine making.

It's called guerrilla gardening.

I have made virtually no impression yet,

but may have just checked the westward progress of the neglect.

Because I am a law-abiding sort,

I once asked the landlords if anything could be done

about the state of the garden before I went in,

but they said they had no longer had any responsibility for it.

I asked them if they would at least mend the fence

which was toppling into their passageway.

After four years someone came and pushed it up

when I pointed out that in the event of a fire

no one would be able to get to safety if the front exit was blocked.

After about an hour of slashing, snagging and scratching

I made a remarkable discovery.

In the midst of all this dereliction-

an astonishing surprise.

I'll tell you about it tomorrow.