rain stopped play

Twice today it has stopped raining and I have gone out into the garden, only to be driven indoors again an hour later, followed shortly afterwards by a damp and irritated Mr Cool.  Looking at the forecast for the week ahead I wondered sadly why every day I was due to be at home and hoping to get on with the garden was set to be wet, when on the days I'd arranged to go out it was forecast to be dry.  Today's rain was not even a proper, groundwater recharging soaking for the most part, just a miserable sift of the sort of drizzle you could try to ignore, before discovering after fifteen minutes that like Mr Cool you were actually quite wet.

I spoke to the postman who had a parcel for me, and he asked how long we had been cut off during the snow.  I said we had been able to get cars out on the Monday morning, after somebody from the farm scraped the drifts off the lane, and it turned out that we were one of only five houses on his round that he'd been unable to reach.  He had taken photographs, though whether purely for amusement or in case we should grumble about not getting deliveries for five days I wouldn't like to say.  Poor postman.  I do get cross when they randomly reassign mail between neighbouring properties, or houses anywhere in the area with the same name, but I don't expect him to clamber through three foot drifts.

In one of the rain breaks I ordered some Pulsatilla vulgaris that were on special offer at Crocus, along with a drought tolerant, partial shade tolerant, suckering, not-too-tall, butterfly friendly shrub that sounded just the thing for ground cover along the side of the wood.  Then I turned to my pile of gardening magazines, and was struck by the charms of a willow with pink catkins, that was apparently happy in soil that was less than permanently damp and a spot that was less than sunny, and thrived on regular hard pruning.  That sounded just the thing for the edge of the wood as well, and I was chagrined to find that Crocus sold it too, since by then I'd used the twenty per cent discount voucher they gave me as a bribe to sign up to the mailing list.  I told myself sternly that the site wasn't yet weeded and ready to go planting willows, and that in any case I might decide I'd rather have an acer.  That's the trouble with being all eager and ready to garden on a wet day.  You end up buying plants instead, before you have anywhere ready to put them.