in the soil Everywhere I go it seems I am bothering somebody. Clearing the fennel bed of teasel and dandelion I disturb a large brown spider clutching beneath it a white ball the size of its abdomen, looking I suppose for a safe place to nest – disturbed from its safe place to nest by this thoughtless ogre – while pulling out the grass that insists on creeping its way into the pond to colonise the water with roots and the beginnings of soil I see the miniature-sea-serpent crest of a newt, scared or at least displeased by the commotion, break through the pondweed and descend. The ants that farm the aphids that strip the stalks of the broad beans and leave them to blacken and die I am happy to disturb, to pinch out the leafy tops they gather in, to wash a hundred corpses off my fingernails. Whatever the ants are getting the aphids to harvest for them from the broad beans they harvest also from the artichoke which sits next door but here I do not mind, they cannot hurt this sprawling perennial that bursts each year a metre high from its root-ball.
It's hell out there in the garden right now - all sympathy! After battling for 25 years with waterweed, chickweed (edible, but only so much), snails (also edible, natch), a visiting otter (for the frogs), and everything the Welsh wildwood could throw at me, I now have a couple of pots on a London window-ledge and a crop of overgrown parsley stalks and a clump of skinny chives.
It's hell out there in the garden right now - all sympathy! After battling for 25 years with waterweed, chickweed (edible, but only so much), snails (also edible, natch), a visiting otter (for the frogs), and everything the Welsh wildwood could throw at me, I now have a couple of pots on a London window-ledge and a crop of overgrown parsley stalks and a clump of skinny chives.
I just wish everything else would grow as tenaciously as the weeds do!