Gardening spirits...
My winter garden looks wonderful in the morning fog - it's spooky, mysterious, and beautiful - alive with gardening spirits, like the Ivory Prince and the Weeping Maiden...
Weeping Maiden Camellia
OK, so one is a Hellebore, the other a Camellia, hee hee. More Hellebores are staring to flower. My goodness, they are sooooooo subtle. And shy. They whisper as I walk past : 'Don't stare at us. And please don't poke at us with a stick so you can take photographs.' Ha! That's exactly what I do!
Ivory Prince Hellebore
Have just had breakfast on the cottage verandah with Speckles the stray cat. Silly Speckles, tummy full of food, gurgling quietly, smooching around me. 'We've known each other for nearly three years' I told him in my sweetest voice. 'Three years! Time you learnt to purr properly.'
No gardening possible...
By the way, no gardening was possible today because of ballet rehearsals, though Non-Gardening Partner did do some more chain-sawing of the fallen Wattle tree. Yeay! Without being asked, too...
The Fence is Fixed
Friday 19th July
It's been many years since I took the Welcome Garden seriously. Enough time for any gardening spirits in here to run amok - or disappear to more fruitful places. So this morning after chamber music (Bach! Yeay!) I will zoom home and clean more of it up. Memo to self, rolled over from Wednesday, demonstrating status of gardener as a responsible property-owner : fix the dog-deterrent fence.
Five gardening hours later...
Yeay! The fence took ages. I rescued the wire netting (which had all but disappeared into next door's paddock grass), cleaned it up, stretched it between my rickety fence-posts and nailed it back. Almost gave up at one stage, thinking to pass the task over to NGP. But no. I persevered. Threaded stakes through the netting and hammered them in so Pebbles can't easily push underneath.
Worked my way along the edge of the Welcome Garden, pulling out dry grass, removing loose bark from a gum tree, trimming Phormiums, digging out seedling Tagasastes, and pruning back the shrubs which had pushed through and caused the demise of the fence in the first place.
Bach and winter gardening...
Now the log-burner is going, and my feet feel great in clean woolly socks. I am very, very happy. Two hours of Bach and five hours of spirited winter gardening - what a wonderful life!