tidiness can be good

Today I finally finished clearing away the remains of the second of two dumpy bags of sharp sand that had been sitting in the front garden for about six years.  They were in full view of the front door and one of the first things visitors saw as they approached the house.  They were originally ordered when I had a scheme to lay the slabs on the paths in the veg patch properly (brought on by reading too many books about the French vegetable garden, the ornamental kitchen garden etc. etc.).  After I'd taken a lot of the slabs up, and before I'd got most of them down again, I developed a novel range of lower back problems, and heavy building work was off the agenda.  In the last couple of years I've learnt to manage my back much better (Pilates works) and would have been up to moving the sand, but there were always lots of other things to do, and I'd got used to the bags.  They sat there even when the garden was en fete for big parties, while guests' eyes conveniently glided around them, or they were too polite to comment.  After enough time has passed you don't really see things any more, or mind them particularly (the spare bedroom door has been held shut with a piece of bent coathanger for a decade on this principle, after the mechanism of the doorknob broke and we didn't immediately work out how to fix it or call in someone who could).  But the front garden does look a lot better without the bags.  Really an awful lot better, and it will be better still once I've got some turf to fill in the bare patches in the grass.

It's a common failing.  In my days as a (mature) horticultural student I had a summer job doing people's gardens.  It was rather low class gardening, more outdoor housework for those who wanted their garden to look tidy but weren't very keen on plants per se.  Cutting down shrubs that naturally grew too large for the position where they'd been planted figured regularly.  I was surprised by how many customers were willing to pay for someone to come (unseen, while they were at work) to cut their grass and pull up their weeds, while leaving mess around their gardens: hoses that had no obvious place to be put away, tools, unused toys, partly used bags of compost from when they did their ornamental pots.  Just stuff.  Clearing away stuff isn't as much fun as fiddling around with plants, but doesn't half makes the garden look better.

I suppose the other moral of the story is to use up one dumpy bag of sand before you order a second.