I got back from a session with the bees to find that the Systems Administrator had disappeared, not to be seen or heard in the house, and I knew the SA wasn't up in the meadow because I'd just come from there. Then I heard muffled thumping noises coming from outside, and saw a piece of vegetation waving wildly outside the dining room window. Excellent, the SA had started cutting back the climbers that had overrun the veranda, a job that was on my things to do list but hadn't made it to the top. The SA was being far more ruthless about it than I ever manage to be, and indeed the climbers, shorn of their hold on the guard rails of the veranda, had begun to sag outwards and were going to need tying in.
I was due to meet a friend for lunch and left the SA to it. When she opened her front door to me she also picked up the post, which included a small hand written envelope. She opened the envelope, which turned out to contain an invitation - to an internment of ashes at Colchester Crematorium. That is one of the troubles of aging, when the funerals start to outnumber the weddings. The deceased died rather suddenly and unexpectedly at a not especially old age, of oesophageal cancer, and she had already been to his wake, but dutifully looked in her diary and wrote in the crematorium ceremony as well. I didn't know the internment of ashes was a thing.
By the time I got back the Systems Administrator had finished gardening for the day, and as we unpacked the groceries I'd bought on the way home the SA announced that he had had an Idea about the back garden which he would share with me once I'd had a cup of tea. I felt a pang of nerves in case I should hate the Idea, mixed with pleasure that the SA was taking an interest in the garden, and a sort of scrupulous intellectual awareness that I couldn't expect another person to contribute their mechanical skills and muscle power indefinitely without being given any say in the project. Mug in hand, I braced myself.
The Idea turned out to be bold, as far as it went, and probably correct. The Systems Administrator proposed cutting down every climber along the back of the house to ground level, likewise the self seeded elder bushes that I pollarded last winter and which have made a good couple of metres growth over the summer so that they block the view from the hall through the study door. The honeysuckle and Boston ivy that keep growing up to engulf the handrail and guard wires of the veranda, sweep out to cover the floor, the barbecue and the pair of steamer chairs, and the pink flowered jasmine that has no scent and not very exciting flowers, all should go. It used to be nice when we could sit on the veranda and see out, said the SA, but it feels claustrophobic now walled in behind the barrier of vegetation even when it hasn't grown all over the chairs. Having cut all the climbers right down we should dig out the roots, and in their place I could plant climbing roses given that we'd been trying to think of places to put some, not too large or rampant varieties, so that we would be able to sit down and still see out.
I took the Systems Administrator's point about the honeysuckle and the jasmine. We have masses of honeysuckle in the rose bank, and it does get everywhere and smother everything, while the jasmine is monumentally dull. Jasminum beesianum is its name, and if you haven't got one I wouldn't bother. And the Boston ivy is a menace. There are marks on the bedroom wall where it previously grew in through the window, and it has already half murdered a Pileostegia and sabotaged the dining room window sill so that rain leaked in and did awful things to the wooden floor. I was rather wistful about the idea of losing the Clematis montana, but the SA softened the Idea a little and said that perhaps we did not have to grub out the roots of the clematis, and it might survive, and would be easier to prune if it were not all mixed up with the honeysuckle, while I admitted that it was pretty rampant and perhaps I could find room for one up a tree along the side of the wood.
So we agreed that this winter when the plants below the veranda are dormant and the things that get cut down have been, the SA would remove the great tangle of vegetation along the back of the house and I would tackle renovating the soil and plant some climbing roses, manageable varieties supposed to reach three metres or so and not rambling monsters like 'Paul's Himalayan Musk'. In my heart I know the SA is right, and that while we're in there I ought to take out a couple of metres from the top of the willow leafed bay. Mature gardens do start to get dark and overgrown, and if there's somebody on the case who can be ruthless about what needs to come out or at least be drastically reduced then that's all to the good. Hats off to Sir Roy Strong who had the guts to do it in his own garden. Most of us need a nudge from somebody less intimately bound up in the whole enterprise.
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