bramble bashing

Now that the bird nesting season is over I am tackling the brambles and nettles that have grown again around the wildlife pond in the meadow.  Last winter the Systems Administrator cut down a lot of their top growth all the way up the side of the wood, and I dug out quite a lot of roots, but then it got too late in the spring to risk removing any kind of undergrowth, and I was busy with all the tidier bits of the garden and the greenhouse.  The remaining bramble roots left to themselves began to regenerate, at first sedately and then as the season wore on and it turned into a wet summer with rampant abandon.  And so here we are again, chopping out unwanted growth less than a year after doing exactly the same thing.

The brambles aren't actually as bad as before, since there isn't a dense tangle of old, dead branches under the new stems like there was last time.  The nettles, on the other hand, are probably worse because they moved to colonize spaces previously dominated by brambles with great enthusiasm.  If we can remove them both including the roots before next spring then after that we must adopt a zero tolerance policy on brambles this side of the rabbit wire, since neither of us have the time or the energy for this level of scrub clearance to become an annual job.  And while the trees and large shrubs have survived their latest brambly inundation I should like to use the space to grow something more interesting under them.

I thought as I chopped away with my pick axe that the saga of the brambles could be used as a metaphor for all sorts of situations in a Thought for the Day sort of way.  Dig out the root as well as clearing away the branches, or your problem will be back before you know it.  Although if we were to push the vegetable metaphor a little further, most plants die eventually if you keep chopping off all their leaves.  And some plants die if you cut all their branches off even once.

The nettles are taller than I am, and so venomously stinging they have managed to get my right thigh through my gardening trousers.  A small but strategically placed hole has opened in the left thumb of my leather pruning gauntlets.  This is Combat Gardening.  By teatime, when I called it a day in the meadow because I wanted to pick blackberries and tomatoes and needed to check the watering, I felt pleasantly exercised.