Multiple gardening clones of me...
Messy Tulips!
OK. How many of me are available for garden work today? I urgently need multiple gardening clones. Firstly - a Pot-Titivater. My new red tulips are embarrassingly messy in their pots and need a stern talking-to, before being popped in some faraway corner of the garden.
Tuesday 25th September
The hyacinths have signalling their tiredness in that time honoured flowery way - by drooping over. Their pots need to be refilled. As do the bedraggled Polyanthus pots scattered all over my patio and decking. The need for their specific winter colour is long gone.
Then I need a Seedsperson - someone with kind, gentle hands, to do the seeds and seedlings. Lavateras and Salvias are ready for pricking out, and the Nasturtium seeds need to be sown. Also there are more spring cuttings to be taken. Everything wants desperately to grow now, even a wee piece of a parent plant.
Cats on the New Vegetable Garden
Naturally I need a Weedsperson - someone with a sunny disposition (like me?) who is relatively mindless (obviously not like me). I also need a general garden-cleaner-upper who could simultaneously entertain my groaning dog and get his mind off food (he's on a diet).
And I Need a Brick-Layer!
But most of all I need a brick-layer. I'm making raised brick walls and a herb spiral - the whole of the vegetable garden has been redirected, so to speak, and the inner curved path is dug as level as it needs to be. First of all I need to find my brick cleaning tools, and then some personal confidence. I have various thymes in pots ready for the planting, plus other herbs, with variegated Creeping Charlie if I feel super-indulgent.
Crabapple Blossom
With all these underlings busy in my garden today I should have time to enjoy the beautiful flowering shrubs. This is the blooming season for Middle Garden's big pink rhododendron - strong pink flowers in leafy dark green, just delightful. The little weeping Crab-Apple (shifted not so long ago into the Glass-house Garden) has made it into blossom, too, and the weeping Silver Pear trees must be nearly in flower. This is their time, too.
Cat and Camellia
Memorial Camellia
But there's more! Sifter the Cat's memorial red Camellia is flowering on the patio, just by the side door. Something so beautiful so close to the house cannot be ignored, yet it's too easy to brush past on the way to weeding and say a cursory 'hello', without stopping. Good morning, striped Sifter. Your red Camellia is looking gorgeous, by the way. All the very best, I miss you, but really! You did behave disgracefully...
Later...
Ha! Instead of all those other persons I found a willing brick-cleaner. So already a goodly pile of bricks are ready for the spiral. Except I'm not sure how to lay bricks with mortar, and I think I need a kite-shaped hand tool, and I need to know which way up the bricks should go... Please tell me it's easy peasy.
Fluff-Fluff the Cat
I've given the Malus a bucket of thank-you water, I've weeded a little in one place, I've pricked out some deep blue Forget-Me-Not seedlings, and done more daisy and penstemon cuttings.
Paw Prints...
So which of you cats has stomped all over my tiny antirhynnum and lobelia seeds? I know the indentation of a large paw print in the seed-raising mix when I see one. Fluff-Fluff, that was you!
And now I'm house-sitting down the road in the most beautiful spring garden. This gardener has pots of tidy, well-behaved red tulips, and I'm envious. Why have mine splattered themselves all over their pots like lounging teenagers? Hers have poise, grace, decorum... Something to do with the gardener?