I was relieved to hear it raining in the night, because I had taken the weather forecast at face value and not set the greenhouse heater, and when I went to bed it still clear and already so cold that if the rain hadn't come I'd probably have been looking at a greenhouse full of frosted plants in the morning. The Systems Administrator warned me this morning that there was a fifty-fifty chance of a prolonged freezing spell at the end of the month, according to one of the more reliable forecasters he follows (have you noticed how the newspapers love to run headlines screaming that Britain is heading for a Big Freeze, then don't say anything if it doesn't happen?). A Big Freeze would be an extremely Bad Thing, so let us hope for good luck in the flip of the weather coin.
It was still jolly cold today, though, and once I'd been to Colchester to run various errands I couldn't summon the enthusiasm to go outside. Even Mr Cool, who loves the outside, had to give up after half an hour, and hung about with the irritated air of a cat who in his head is in outdoor mode, but is forced to be indoors by circumstances. I tried to stroke him, but he skittered away from under my hand and went back to staring out of the windows. Mr Fluffy, who takes a more relaxed approach to life, pragmatically settled down after several helpings of breakfast and went to sleep in his fleecy bed. Our Ginger planted himself firmly in front of the electric fire, and Mr Fidget who is a law unto himself went to sleep in his favourite chair in the unheated sitting room at the other end of the house. The Systems Administrator, who has got the bit between his teeth in the great project to remove the thicket of climbers from below the veranda, went out for a bit but came in again saying that it was too cold and about to rain, and then it did rain.
The veranda already looks massively better for not being hemmed in by plants. Suddenly the view down into the garden is opened up again, with only the wooden handrail and two strands of rigging wire between the house and the garden. There is a moral there, to keep looking afresh at your garden, your house, and the relationship between them. Over a couple of decades plants can grow massively, but slowly, so that you don't register how dark and congested an area has become. This is where it can be helpful, if you are a plant lover, to ally yourself with somebody who is not at all sentimental about individual plants and may look at the scene with a clearer eye.
I called at the Chatto Gardens en route to Colchester, and found them in the middle of a revamp that made our veranda project look like an afternoon's light pruning. Signs said that the drive was being resurfaced. In the meantime access was via a surprisingly solid temporary hard track next to the drive, but all around was a sea of mud, with great mounds of soil, stationary earth moving machines, and glum faced men trudging around in the rain in high vis jackets. In the car park were several vans with names painted on the side invoking Drainage Solutions. An apologetic notice by the till explained that due to the wet weather the resurfacing was taking longer and proving more complicated than expected. Given how dry the famous Chatto dry garden on the site of the old car park is, I was amazed that the route from there to the main road could be quite so wet, but it was. That's the trouble with building. You never know quite what you are going to find until you start digging.
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