I love my garden. Its semi-classic, semi-wild and semi-lunacy (that’ll be the giraffe). Three semis. A mathematical impossibility but a lovely place to sit in the summertime. Takes a lot of care. Apparently. So I mow the lawn. That’s my job. Man’s job. Mel does more delicate things with little scissor things and special gardening gloves. I use bare hands. So I’m ‘one with nature’ as I kill it. Man to man. I do the lawn and I do the killing. Because sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. Tough love. Its a Darwinian world out there.

Ivy. That’s one thing that regards me as its personal ‘hit man’. Otherwise instead of a house, you have an ivy plant. It just takes over. So needs culling. I’m sure there are rules, advice, proper ways to do it. In the spring, just after the autumn, blah, blah. I just grab it and pull. Anytime. Don’t care. You ain’t having my fucking flowers, ya bastard!

And then we grew another little ‘problem’. Suckers, we call them. Really long, suddenly appearing very thorny branches that just suddenly appear. One weekend you have a neat bush, the next one theres 17 3-metre long, bright green shoots, about half an inch thick, covered in thorns. So I get my shears and attack them. Next weekend they’re back. And bigger, stronger, more thorny, more aggressive. Harder to shear.

Last weekend after our week in Malta I saw a few suckers hanging over a rather large bush at the back. And they were covered in blackberries. About 3 metres off the ground. I wasn’t so concerned about the blackberries themselves, (though they are absolutely gorgeous, and FREE!! you have to love nature) but the ‘sucker’ had now invaded, taken over and was displacing our very lovely and very old bush. Back, right. Behind which sits the shed that Mel & I built one sunday morning whilst the kids were out learning to pray proper. Must have worked, the prayer that is, because 20 years later the shed’s still standing. Only God knows how.

So I attacked the suckers. With long shears whilst on a ladder. And harvested about 6lbs of blackberries, most of which were in ‘past-slime’ mode, but some made it into the freezer. I removed literally yards and yards of horrible, prickly bush. And this weekend its back. Bigger than before. Blackberried up and challenging me. ‘Are you ‘ard enough??’ it says. ‘You want some???’ (as in violence, not blackberries). So tomorrow I’m going out there. With a saw. Big one. And only one of us is comin’ out of this alive.

Probably the bush.

Happy green-fingered Friday

A xxxx