Last week, I finally had time to see what had happened to my garden while I hadn’t been there. Turns out that the magical garden gnomes had been silently helping me.
I couldn’t see anyone when I arrived so I began to wander. Amazingly, everything looked great. The red garden was in top shape, the cottage garden looked well groomed, and someone had removed the new shoots on my tiny supply of olive trees.
I ventured forward down the path. Everything still looked great, but in the distance I could hear voices in conversation. Following the sound, I walked to the end of the surrounding wall of the marquee pad and looked down. A group of men stood gossiping.
Par for the course. The men do a lot of talking, except my favourite garden gnome, Noel. Naturally I called out to them and said nothing very interesting and they told me to come on down.
Noel went back along the under-path saying he had something to show me. What I saw was a very neat, mulched path to the old fig tree where we had worked so hard the year before. The tree had finally been freed from the old wire fencing that had been strangling it for the past twenty years. The sun had been let in and new growth was beginning to show.
However, the path continued on, and curled right down to the back fence.
I never imagined we would ever get this far, because the maintenance of the rest of the garden kept us too busy. But not only had the guys reached the back, they had picked up all the rocks and stones I had (very efficiently) gotten rid of by throwing them over the marquee pad. These shocking eyesores had been scrunched up into long rows of edging.
This path led the way to the old glass house, whose frame and glass had disappeared some years ago. All that remained was the brick floor, which the guys had decided would be a great little gossip spot. (Guys love gossip spots.) They had arranged a few old logs around the edge as seating.
But this story is still not over.
The mulched and edged path did a right hand turn and began to aim at the main garden. Through a series of twists and quite a bit ducking overhanging branches, we made our way right to the other garden.
At last the two gardens have been joined into one.