Gardening

Officially I think my arms are going to drop off, if the bites on my legs don't swell up and kill me first. Yesterday I mowed, raked and bagged the clippings, watered, and then repotted a huge palour palm from a quite enormous pot into a really enormous pot and carried it all by myself back into the sitting room (and I discovered two plants which I thought had died off at least two years ago have made an reappearance). Today I went with boyfiend to his small garden and lopped loads of branches, deadheaded a mass of roses, weeded, helped dredge a stinking pond and cut back a vine.

And on the bus on the way home I remembered that gardening is all about love, nurture, caring, watching the plants grow, their fronds unfurl, their vines extend and curl round things, buds form and stuff. Both the men in my life with some kind of interest in gardens (boyfiend and pops) tend to be chop-em-down types in the brutalist vein. More about clearing and neatness than natural plant growth. I'm trying to work on them both, with a drip drip kind of nuture. Hopefully they'll grow into it.