We have a pretty long garden - 43 metres in fact. I know that because I once measured it - from our kitchen door to the little white gate that opens onto the back lane. 43 metres is 47 yards.
In the depths of winter, when it's cold and often dark and wet, I hardly venture out into the garden at all - maybe an occasional trip up to the compost bins with kitchen waste - vegetable peelings and the like. But at other times of the year, good weather will often draw me out and I get on with jobs like cutting the grass, trimming the privet hedges, digging, weeding or just pottering about.
Two or three hours in the garden does me a world of good. I return to the house feeling somehow energised and with the satisfying knowledge that I have done some jobs that needed doing.
Since the episode with that horrible antibiotic - nitrofurantonin, I have remained in gradual recovery mode and just have not felt magnetised by the garden even though there were jobs that needed doing. Ours is not a neat, manicured garden. I am happy that it has an obvious element of wildness though it will never be as wild and unkempt as when we moved into this house in 1989.
The previous owners had done nothing to the garden during the decade that they lived here. They were national "Scrabble" champions so I guess they needed to spend time checking obscure words in dictionaries rather than trimming the hedges or cutting the grass. There was no fence at the bottom and no garden gate but they had made a well-trodden path to the rotary clothes airer that stood in the middle of their mini-savannah - an oasis for neighbourhood cats and butterflies.
You could say that I made our garden from scratch - taming and cutting back the jungle, creating borders, building a path, erecting a greenhouse, planting greenery and making a vegetable plot and a wall and a fence and the little white gate that is now in dire need of replacement. It has served us well for thirty years but nothing lasts forever.
Anyway, today I was drawn out there. I put my old fleece on and my fingerless gloves and got cracking with the right hand hedge. It will be the last time I trim it this year. One of the plus points of a Yorkshire wintertime is that grass and hedges stop growing so you can put away your lawnmower and your electric hedge trimmer till the following springtime.
Though sunny, there was a definite chill in the air today. Leaves are turning colour and starting to fall. I could detect the distant odour of a bonfire. A robin hopped around as I raked up the hedge clippings and a pair of magpies quarrelled in a nearby conifer tree - cacophonous and raspy. Yes autumn is here.
from Yorkshire Pudding https://ift.tt/NJ3WYE8