Tidying up the daffodil lawn isn't taking as long as I was afraid it was going to. That's a welcome change, since I generally err in the opposite direction, optimistically assuming that garden tasks will be completed by lunchtime only to find that they stretch out over two and a half days. The Systems Administrator has managed to do a pretty thorough job with the power scythe, so that when I rake the cut grass off there aren't too many tufty bits underneath that need finishing by hand. The fact that the Eleagnus hedge has spread out so far the lawn is only two thirds the size it used to be might have something to do with it as well.
The bank along one edge of the lawn still has to be cut entirely with shears. In desperation once I tried using an electric hedge trimmer, but nowadays I stick with cutting it manually. It's more peaceful. Last year I managed to sprain my wrist quite badly through doing too much at once. I remember the date and how I discovered I'd done it, because it was December 10th, and I did a woodland charity talk that evening. As I tried to push the plug of my extension cable into a rather stiff wall socket my wrist twinged, and I realised to my horror that I'd done something to it. I had to rest it until after Christmas. Even using my finger to play Sudoku on my tablet hurt.
So this year I am being very careful and not spending all day on it, or even all afternoon. At one end of the scale, by way of a change I sowed some pots of home harvested Leopard Lily seed. That's Belamcanda chinensis, only it's changed its name to Iris domestica. It's the one with the charming yellow and orange spotted six petalled flowers, of which I planted half a dozen and only one came up the following year. That one must have been self fertile, since the flowers were followed by bulbous seed pods, and these have opened in the past few days to reveal fat black seeds. They looked like the sort of seeds that ought to be sown at once, before they could shrivel up, and so I did.
At the other end of the scale I have made a start chopping around the conifer stump with the pick axe. It's fairly brutal work, but it probably uses different muscles to the shears. So far all I have to show for my efforts is a pathetic little trench around the sawn off trunk, but I shall keep at it. An hour of shears, an hour of swinging the axe and I'll be there in no time.
Once the lawn is cleared there comes the real brute of a job, which is reducing the back of the Eleagnus hedge. A lot. I got away with taking the front hard back last autumn, so let's hope that my second assault doesn't kill it. There is a very funny little book by journalist James Bartholomew called Yew and Non-yew, in which he conclusively demonstrates that whatever your hedging conundrum, the correct answer is yew. It is all tongue in cheek, but the worrying thing is that he might be right. Sitting drinking tea today on the terrace (or patio), contemplating the swirls of dead brown Eleagnus leaves that have already accumulated on the paving even though I swept it quite recently, and the semi-disappearance of the daffodil lawn, I fear he was.
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