We took ten minutes this morning to do something which made the back garden look instantly better, and moved the aluminium platform and step ladder away from their conspicuous position in the centre middle ground, where they'd been forming a sort of sub Anthony Caro focal point for the past fortnight, tucking them away in a corner where you can't see them from the house. Or at least, if you peer hard through a large rose bush, there is the glint of metal, but they no longer dominate the view.
They ended up in full sight because that's where I was using them to cut overhanging branches from the willows along the boundary. They stayed there because they were needed for the next pruning project in the back garden, to tidy up the wild gean, and lift the crown of a hazel that's shading the ditch bed, if it's possible to get the platform in without wrecking the border. And then the Systems Administrator had a cold, I had a cold, it rained and was windy, and nobody felt like pruning, or manoeuvring the platform into any tight spaces. Now they are lying on the lawn under the gean, almost out of sight, but ready for the next stage, as soon as we are both feeling stronger.
It is garden trap that's very easy to fall into. Things you think you are going to use again get left outside, especially when they're made of plastic, or quite old, and you aren't worried about them going rusty, or getting stolen. Lawn rakes, wheelbarrows, snakes of hose, plastic buckets. Why, you reason, should I lug all this back to the shed when I am going to want it again tomorrow? The Henchman is not heavy in absolute terms, but it is bulky, and awkward for me to carry by myself. Its cross struts unscrew so that it can be packed flat for storage, but it's a fiddly job, undoing all those bolts and being careful not to drop any of the wing nuts in the grass and lose them. If you have to find a second person to help you move a piece of equipment any distance, there's even less incentive to remove it from the site until you are quite sure you have finished with it. Fate, of course, has a way of intervening, in the form of weather, illness, or other commitments, and tomorrow's planned job too easily becomes next month's.
It's not just tools that end up getting left lying around. Bags of weeds on their way to the space by the dustbins pending a run to the dump, terracotta pots whose contents have died, and which need to be emptied of compost before being stowed in the shed, sawn off branches destined variously for the log pile or bonfire heap. It's easy to remain engrossed in the task in hand, thinking that you'll put those away later, until it gets dark, or starts to rain, and you hastily pack up your tools and go in.
I know I am not the only person who does this. In my horticultural student days, working for a garden maintenance company in the summer, we had one client whose patio was a perpetual muddle of hosepipe, half used bags of compost, plastic trowels and watering cans. We mowed their lawn, even moving the bird bath out of the way to do so, and weeded their borders, but left the muddle where it was. After all, we didn't even know where we were supposed to put it. I was always puzzled, though, as to why the owners bothered to pay us to tidy the growing parts of their garden while they were out at work, while never taking half an hour to clear up the jumble of plastic outside the patio doors.
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