An email arrived yesterday from the rose firm to say that they had lifted and despatched my roses, and the delivery would be with me in one to three working days. When a woman knows she is to receive a bag of bare root roses in two or three days, never mind a fortnight, it concentrates her mind wonderfully, particularly when the planting sites are not yet completely ready.
Unfortunately it was raining first thing. It stopped after a while, and I went out into the garden and continued pulling up ivy and the roots of nettles behind the oil tank. The drizzle resumed within the hour, however, and after a few minutes of drizzle I realised that this was by now serious rain. I gathered up my tools and retreated. Weather one, gardener nil. And I need to pick up another load of manure to dig into the planting holes.
I know that gardeners and agricultural workers in the old days could not afford to be so squeamish about rain, but I expect they all suffered from rheumatism before dying of exhaustion or pneumonia at what we should regard as a prematurely early age. The great canal engineer James Brindley died aged 56 after contracting a chill precipitated by being caught in a severe rainstorm, the last of many soakings in his busy working life. My nose is already dripping like a faulty tap, and I maintain that getting damp is not good for people.
No comments:
Post a Comment