After the Lord Mayor’s Show

Ah yes, there is always a bit of a tidy up after the builders leave.  Piles of stones, leftover granite setts (228 of them) and soil.

My sense of aesthetics are more finely tuned than our dear builders.

They just don’t see my carefully landscaped gardens as anything but an almost finished building site.

And when their heavy truck drives up to the house the whole east garden shudders in anticipation of a good gouging from the tyres.

How many times over the past year have I raked soil, added soil, picked out bits of broken tarmac, odd stones and oversized pebbles from this entrance to the house?

All in a good cause. I know, I know.

The one good thing is I have an easy spot to dump all the unwanted rocks and broken tarmac.  There is a gap in the terrace below the road where the last flood roared through, leaving behind a ravine.

So I didn’t have far to go with my little wheelbarrow loads of mess.

The granite setts have gone up to the reclamation yard that is the far parking area at the very east end of the garden.  Here we have special rocks and stones that were removed from a building site in the village. Gorgeous stone lintels and worked boulders that would grace any stone farm house. Except the stone is a little yellow; not our sightly greyer granite. So they can wait for another day.

It’s also here where I am storing spare limstone hoggin in case the courtyard needs topping up.  And there seems to be some rather nice builder’s sand hiding under a tarp.

Luckily you can’t see this pile of building material from the house. And we now park the cars in front. And there is a cheeky pile of branches that are too thick for me to chip and too spindly to bother sawing up for firewood.  They hide all sins.

Now that I have raked and landscaped this area. Again. I have put up some stones around the perimeter as a sorte of aide memoire for the next truck that roars up.

Bebere needs to take his concrete mixer away (‘before Christmas, promise’). And then I can remove the rocks.

Or maybe I should paint a little ironic sign that says ‘ceci est un jardin’.