June Rose

Back in mid June I suffered the ultimate gardening injury – a slipped disc.  Well, strictly speaking I understand it to be a herniated disc.  I wasn’t even gardening – I had simply been doing some house work in the flat, leaned across a table to straighten a piece of paper on the mantle piece and it felt like a piece of my back simply tore.  It was agony, though the next day it was not the back that hurt as much as my leg which felt like it had been hit repeatedly with a rounders bat.  I never realised this was what sciatica felt like.

So I was off gardening duties, but the same week the annual open day for Galhampton gardens took place.  We paid our monies and took our choice of the horticultural delights that the villagers wanted to display.  It was an interesting meander through gardens which ranged from little more than one herbaceous border and a lot of grass to others that had every last square centimetre prepped and planted with complimentary veg and flowers.  Others were open seemingly just to display their birds or their model railway.  It was an eclectic mix.

No Tomatoes

The one recurring theme that seemed to cause angst with Mrs B was the size of most people’s tomatoes.  Paddi’s already had good-sized fruit in June, while ours were only just ready to planted out, and other gardeners were seemingly about harvest a bumper crop when we made our grand tour.  Beware gardening envy – it is the green fingered monster that doth mock the peat on which it feeds.   Covetousness enveloped us as we viewed other tomatoes and devoured our horticultural self-respect as we ambled through in the warm June sunshine.

But when we got back to the garden we realised (or rather Mrs B accepted) that there were still plenty of good things in our patch that commended our piece of ground to us.  Like the mature trees such as the amelanchier and the bean tree, or the established herbaceous borders that we love so much or the more recent extension to the boomerang bed which we were hoping would come up strong with a range of perennials

Husband and wife back together again – with a tentative hug of unity (careful with the back dear).