Summer, Almost...

Well, Saturday was rather splendid, weatherwise. So, thinks me, perhaps I should finally sort out my garden. Sadly, I have somewhat ignored it for the past two years, as I was away in sunny Los Angeles last summer, and the summer before that it didn't really need any work.

Anyway, my mother has been mentioning that perhaps I ought to cut back the giant spindly rose bushes for quite some time now and, seeing as the sun was out and all, it appeared that I had run out of my usual "but it's snowing/raining/windy/there are spiders" excuses. Well, not entirely actually. I did find a nest of tiny spiders hovering in a large and many legged ball over an empty plant pot. Hmmm, I thought, that is slightly alarming. I pictured them when they were all grown up and laying siege to my house and decided they had to go. I bravely poked the pot with a very long stick to ascertain the chances of me scooping the whole thing up and relocating it somewhere that wasn't my garden, but as I poked it, a mass of the tiny creatures swarmed up over the side of the pot. Ever seen the movie Arachnophobia? It was just like that, but in minature. Subsequent visions of them swarming over me like the scarab scene in The Mummy put paid to further thoughts of relocation. Which only left the option of death :( Now, I am terrified of spiders, but I am also a nice vegetarian who is kind to animals and the thought of arachnid genocide perpetrated by me was greatly upsetting (although after the boy pointed out the actual meaning of genocide, I did downgrade it to mass murder). The fact that this incident coincided with my monthly PMT induced emotional meltdown only served to upset me further. In the end, after much handwringing and pacing, a happy ending was reached when my flatmate marched into the garden, picked up the whole thing and took it across the road to a nice tree. Yay! That one small action almost totally makes up for 2 years of him failing to do the washing up or clean the bathroom. I said almost...

Anyway, after that large digression from the original point, many large woody things in the garden were cut back, ivy was tamed and things now deceased through 2 years of wilful neglect on my part were dug up. Five large garden waste sacks and a few blisters later, the boy had forked over all the earth now exposed through lack of weeds and I had discovered that we have a total of 4 shovels in our shed. Who needs 4 shovels!? The garden now looks much tidier, if a little bare:



So, off I pottered with the boy to Stoke Newington, where there are several lovely plant shops. I purchased a fuschia, as they remind me of mum, a lavender plant, as the smell reminds of of my nan's garden when I was little, a mint plant, as I can make mojitos with it, and a large pink flowery thing, just because it was pretty.

And here they are:
I planted them in the garden a whole 5 days ago now, and they're all totally still alive! Go me! And, with my newly clean and shiny garden, we had a barbeque on Monday. It rained. But, you know, we're British goddammit, and fired up the coals anyway. And do you know what? It was great :)

Here's looking forward to many more barbeques, hopefully in the sunshine this time, in my new garden.