Hello There, VivBounty here,
So now that we live in the country to accommodate Pedro and avoid the rat race, my mum is determined to turn me into a gardener.
As a result, I have created my first flowerbed. I expected a feeling of accomplishment, but I had not anticipated how excited I would be after I finished this project.
You see, it all happened quite naturally. My mum is an avid gardener. Her down time is gardening. As you will
see on my other blog, she recently visited with us for 16 days. She arrived here with bulbs and plants uprooted from her own garden 1,000 miles away to begin ours. No amount of telling her that my hubby's idea of gardening is to ride his lawn tractor once a week could deter her from digging a holes in various spots around our lawn to plant irises, hydrangeas, and lilies.
During the family visit, a knowledgeable neighbour found that our horse chestnut tree was on the verge of dying and falling over on to our wood shed. That very same day it was chopped down, sawed into pieces and left on the lawn to be further cut into firewood. He went off to do other jobs as is the custom in the village, leaving Mum very concerned about what this would do to the grass. She suggested leveling off the stump, hollowing out the center to add soil for a draping flowering plant and around the stump planting perennials which require minimal effort, etc., etc. Her imagination ran rampant. "Just to give you a bit of colour", she kept saying. My imagination was on blog posts, but then all the store flyers arrived with flowers and gardening tool sales and I started to see this colour my mum was on about.
Eventually the crew arrived to clean up the tree and I began weeding around the 3 pitiful plants left here by the previous owner of the house. They immediately perked up and seemed to be reaching for the sun. The next thing I knew I was edging a circle around the tree stump and tilling the soil. My neighbour came home and wandered over to move the last piece of the trunk away. I was crouched over contemplating my next move and seemingly out of nowhere I found myself repeating Mum’s words, asking him if he could saw the huge stump off level, instead of digging it and all its massive roots out. This was music to his ears.
A day later I borrowed a wheelbarrow, with doggy, Pedro in tow I filled it with more than enough bricks to edge my flowerbed from a old wool mill recently demolished behind our house. Not that I could move it with 55 bricks in it but it was a start. How was I to know how hard it is to push a wheelbarrow? Three bricks at a time I moved them to my garden and began to place them in a circle. Pedro was in his element helping me dig the now almost colourful flowerbed. The stump hasn’t been embellished yet, but all in good time. We sent Mum pictures, she is absolutely ecstatic and very proud of her little girl. Isn’t that the validation every daughter lives for?
Prosperous Blessings,
VivBounty
VivBounty Wonderfully Natural Living
