I have sown my seed!

(Stop giggling!)  What I mean is that my absence from this blog for the last week (for which apologies and normal service is now re-instated) is entirely due to the rites of spring - and certainly not that sort, either!  During the winter I remain happily steeped in sloth and indolence whilst my garden, under snow or frost, looks as pretty as anyone else's, and if either of them fail to put in an appearance, then the driving winds and rain stop people from looking in the first place.  However, sooner or later the sun begins to shine and truly can it be said that spring has sprung!  At this point my garden, which would grace the Imperial War Museum as a reasonable facsimile of the Western Front, c. 1916,  stands, or rather droops, in all its pathetic, mournful, weed-ridden decrepitude for all to see.  The neighbours begin to nudge and point and smirk, at which point the little 'Memsahib' begins to hint and nag and threaten.  An interesting philosophical, not to say physical, experiment then ensues between my immovable mass and her irresistible force - so, not much doubt how that turns out, then!

Once again, Lear-like, I shake my puny fist at the cosmos and howl something about why is it that all my lovely flowers are, Cordelia-like, "dead, dead dead" but the weeds are flourishing as never before?  And such is their vigour and growth that I cannot get away with leaning on a hoe in a comfortable upright stance making desultory stabs at this one or that one, speeding up a little if I sense the little 'Memsahib' peering from a window, but must bend and kneel, and dig and scrape, and still mostly pull up leaves and stalk leaving the hidden root to torment me in the summer when huge Triffid-like growths appear in the middle of my Begonias.  (Honestly, I could win the prize at the Church Fete for my thistles!)

Honesty (dammit!) forces me to confess that if you imagine me living in Duff Castle surrounded by a series of walled gardens in the Elizabethan style, each with a different floral theme, you are mistaken.  Actually, when I bought this house my garden was the size of a postage stamp and as soon as I could get the idea past the little 'Memsahib', I turned half of it into a patio, thus reducing it to the size of half a postage stamp.  In my incredulous credulity I thought I had pulled off a bit a result with that smart move but I had not reckoned on the little 'Memsahib' spending a small fortune on what appears to be the greatest collection of pots and urns you will see outside of the British Museum.  Not only do I have to weed them, feed them and plant them, but also I have to move them, assuming, of course, that I can actually straighten my legs and my back after several hours in the original garden.

On top of all this, dear reader (oh, yes, there is more, much more, to my suffering), there remains, on the other side of the house, the immortal, everlasting resting-place of the all-too-mortal - the churchyard!  I am responsible for a strip that runs the entire length of the eastern boundary.  I swear that it gets longer each spring when I trudge out reluctantly to give it its first cut.  It wouldn't be so bad if I could just march up and down in easy straight lines but the good Lord has seen fit to encourage primulas and daffodils and cowslips to grow here and there in very inconvenient bunches and it would be more than my life was worth to run the mower over the lot of them, the old ladies who regularly patrol (well, it's a walk, really, but I am suspicious of their frequency) up and down the church path keep a very beady eye on me.  I ask you, is it any wonder that I'm an agnostic?

On top of all that, of course, is the gloomy knowledge that everywhere the sap is rising - except in me!

Comments

[Fallenmonk]

Oh Yes! A major right of spring which, as each of us males grow older, our female masters relish the increasing ease of punishment available.
I just wish to observe that while recently in at a nice country house for a wedding just outside of Broadway I marveled at the ingenuity of the gardener in randomly planting spring flowering things all across an otherwise acceptable lawn. I thought to myself then about what torture it would be to mow. It seems there must be an "English Johnny Appleseed" gaily prancing about the UK planting churchyards and otherwise perfectly uniform green spaces with spring flowers in completely random patterns that will double or even triple the effort to mow.

[David Duff]

Quite so, but it's not just the bunches of flowers, it's all those blasted grave stones - soooo inconvenient! As I pointed out to the vicar when we arrived here, despite the entirely spurious claims of the Archbishop of Canterbury, I look upon this particular churchyard as my front garden. He only smiles at me rather distantly now and only because I cut his grass!