Monday 9 June 2008

It's a hard hard life

I love the garden at this time of year when there are plenty of flowers and yet still lots of favourites to come, and some yet in the polytunnel waiting to be bedded out.  It's a busy time but I'm not the sort of person who can just sit and look for very long without seeing a weed needing a tug or something needing an extra stake.  The one exception is first thing in the morning when I sit near our rough ponds and watch the dragonflies prising themselves out of their ugly adolescent carapaces, reminiscent of a Hammer Horror film, to rest and dry their wings in the early sunshine until fully pumped up they can fly away.  Here's where I sit every day from about 6am until 7am when I fetch the lead and get the dog out in the lanes.

When it gets too hot to do anything but read then I take my chair into the dappled shade under the old apple tree and spend a couple of hours wafting away money spiders which drop from the branches and watching the birds in the pear tree nest boxes.

Then at the end of the day, I sit at my dining room patio waiting for my hair to dry and sipping something cold while I watch the swallows flycatching over the paddock and listen to the swifts screaming overhead.

My fingers are permanently stained, my nails are ragged and my sandalled feet don't bear description but all in all a summer spent gardening takes a lot of beating.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Wow, more awesome pictures.  I sometimes use them as my computer desktop wallpaper background.  :-)