I had a busy day yesterday.

One of the problems with having a bit of land is that it takes a lot of hard work. 

I like a garden to look natural.  I’m not one for neat straight lines and perfectly clipped hedges.  As someone once said – if I wanted my hedges to look perfectly straight with perfect angles, I might as well build a concrete wall and paint it green.  No.  I like my garden to look natural and a little bit on the wild side.

Unfortunately, Nature doesn’t agree with me.

It wants my garden to look absolutely on the wild side.

Yesterday it was time to tackle the hedge out on the road.  The original hedge was a Berberis but that has been completely taken over by brambles and that seems to be growing at the rate of about ten foot a week.  So yesterday was a power-tools and brute force day.  Slash-hooks and cutters.  You get the gist.

By the end of the day I managed to cut back the hedge by a few feet and the mountain of garden rubbish in the woodland has correspondingly grown by a couple of feet.  And I managed to direct some tourists up to the bogs, which was satisfying.

One problem with gardening is that I seem to be incapable of doing it without gaining loads of scratches and scrapes and loosing a fair quantity of blood.  My arms are more scar than skin, and that is despite wearing very heavy leather gauntlets.  I don’t know how the thorns do it, but they always get to me somehow.

So today I am taking things easy.  I shall spend the day recharging batteries [mine and the power tools] and picking thorns and spikes out of my skin.

There are times when I actually begin to think that Summer has its disadvantages.