There is a dodgy smell outside the conservatory, as if something had died under the deck. Short of lifting some of the planks there's no way of finding out. Instead I'm hoping that whatever it is was fairly small, and will dry out and stop smelling soon. It can't be Black and White Alsatian Killer Cat because I saw him slinking across the neighbour's field early this morning. Our two are lying next to me as I type this, Our Ginger snoring on the table though the glint of an eye shows that he is not really asleep, and the short indignant tabby lying next to the cupboard containing the chicken chewies and purring very hard, as if I might give her one if only she reminds me what great happiness a small elderly cat is capable of experiencing in the right circumstances.
I have been tidying up around the top lawn. It's an area of the garden that gets left out when I'm on chicken minding duties, because they don't seem keen on visiting it. It was looking rather sad and drought stricken, and lacking in colour because several of the roses that are in theory capable of repeat flowering haven't produced a second flush as it's been so dry. I hesitate to use the word drought having just listened to the R4 programme about the Californian drought. That's a real drought, farmers are having to fallow sections of their land and wells are running dry. They're only a few years in, and analysis of tree rings from giant sequoias that have been felled show that in the past droughts have lasted for up to a century, and that's before taking any effects of climate change into account.
The prudent and solvent have been drilling deep wells. The business of drilling for water is booming. Farming, and businesses serving the communities dependent on farming, not so hot. Unlucky if you have a shallow well whose catchment has been depleted by your neighbour's new, deeper one.
So what we have here is nowhere near a drought, just a blip in a dry county. Tidying up couldn't compensate for the lack of flowers in places, but in fact once I'd cleared away the shrivelled leaves of the Camassia from the far rose bed, and recut the lawn edge with a half moon edger, things looked much fresher. The trimmings from the edge of the lawn are bound for the dump rather than the compost heap, since while turf in theory rots down to a lovely loam our lawn is full of unspeakable weeds, and there's a lot to be said for edging it while it's dry. The sods weigh practically nothing, and I might even get away with putting them in the brown bin, which came with stern instructions that it would not be emptied if it exceeded a certain weight limit. Since I have no way of weighing the bin when full I can't do anything to make sure I keep to the limit, short of making sure that the lid will still shut, which I check carefully each time I add anything to it, even tucking in stray stems to make sure that nobody could claim that the lid wasn't down. Though our dustman seem very helpful and not at all jobsworthy.
One of the unspeakable weeds in the lawn is the little blue flowered Pratia pedunculata. I tried a patch as ground cover at the front of the near rose bed, but it found the solid clay discouraging, and whenever I saw it in other gardens I was reminded how it ought to look bonnier and bouncier than mine did. But now it has made the progression to the lawn it is much happier, the relatively porous texture of the grass sward perhaps more to its liking. I thought it was rather pretty, not having a fetish about lawns being uniformly green. Big rosettes of weeds (and I have those too) disrupt the visual unity of the surface, but what's the harm in tiny flowers, like clover, or Pratia? Which said, in checking I'd remembered its name correctly I have found a dire warning posted on the Alpine Garden Society's website, naming it as a horror, spread indefinite. It sounds as though the Pratia, having got going, may continue indefinitely until it has colonised the entire lawn. Still, since it didn't like life in the flowerbed and the far rose bed is even more clayey than the near one, it will probably stop when it gets to the far edge, and the whole lawn is full of clover anyway. Travelling the other way when it gets to the island bed it will just have to fight it out with the Coronilla varia.
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