A bit of reminiscence

What do you know – we finally got summer here in London! Well, better late than never I suppose...may it last the whole month! I have been out in my garden trying to do a bit of work the last week. My new garden helper came Monday and together we started on a long list of tasks for my neglected garden.

The most important task was to spray against greenflies and black spot, not something I usually have to worry about at this time of year, but with all the rain we have had this summer the greenflies are still present in numbers. I am slowly recovering and I am able to do a few things as long as I can hang on to at least one crutch whilst standing. My garden helper was a star, carrying things around, up and down my garden, spraying the whole arch for me, and between us we managed to do quite a bit in those 2 ½ hours she was here. 

I haven’t got any new pictures of my garden for you yet, but I have made another movie, a compilation of pictures from 2005 – 2012 of the overview picture I usually post. The movie shows how my garden has changed over the years, from a garden with a big lawn with small flower beds, to larger flower beds with a small lawn and finally even larger flower beds and just a small winding path and no lawn. The movie is a great reminder of what a transformation the garden has made as well as what transformation I have made as a gardener; I have learned a lot since I started in this garden in early 2002, my gardening skills are mostly acquired by trial and error. Looking back it also reminds me of how few plants I had back then, I haven’t made it easy for myself by filling it to the rafters! But I love the way my garden looks now, especially in the summer, that secluded look where you actually can’t see everything in one go, despite the tiny size of it – you really have to go for a stroll to discover each part of the garden.

The movie is saved in HD and will absolutely look best if you open it in full screen and view it in HD, but to enable my readers to view my movies in the small YouTube size if they want to, the quality setting is by default set too low for full screen view. If you opt for the small size though, please change to a higher quality setting. For best result I recommend you to:

-Start the movie

-Click on the tiny gear icon on the bottom line to change quality and choose 720p or 1080p HD 

-Click on the icon for full screen

-Push the progress bar back to start to get the movie to start from the beginning

...and when the annoying ad turns up, click the X inside the ad to make it go away. The ads are Google’s ‘punishment’ for when we don’t make our own music. If you find that your Internet connection is too slow, pause the movie for a moment so it can download a bit before you resume.

And what’s next for my garden? I have so many plans but the next area I want to tackle is the seating area, a rather neglected part of my garden which has looked the same for the last 8 years. It’s about time it got a facelift. Next spring I think. Until next time, take care.