Glam garden
Here it is. My many pathed vegetable garden. All gravelled and looking very chic.
I was contemplating days of toil with the filling in of the paths and then covering with gravel. But lo and behold – help at hand!
Alexander (Jean Daniel’s son) and his girlfriend Caroline have come up for a few days of holidays in the Ardeche. They cruised past to look at the garden yesterday afternoon and found me heaving away with buckets of gravel. It was wonderfully social.
And then Jean Daniel turned up for a look as we had our first ever traffic jam on the drive – Frence Telecom were trying to repair the internet and had parked their van in the road to reach the pylon. So there was Jean Daniel volunteering their services for a spot of wheelbarrow work.
And my wishes came true. Three people can make all the work go so much faster. I was delighted.
We unearthed more old broken tiles, and then parts of our old ceiling which were hanging about the forest.
They were the light loads.
Then came the enormous job of moving the gravel. It’s about 150 metres from the gravel pile to the garden with the fun of a steepish downhill slope and then a push up to the garden.
They worked like trojans. I felt almost embarrassed that I wasn’t doing the heavy load work.
I had to scrabble about getting the fabric down to cover the rubble. And creep around the small emerging seedlings to fill in the paths with buckets of stones.
Early in the afternoon after my dear kind friends had staggered home for lunch I snuck out and did the last four paths on my own. I had to do my bit – even if it meant lots more trips with smaller buckets of gravel.
It looks very bright still, but it will settle down. Right now I think it looks way too chic and neat. It needs vegetables and flowers to soften the lines.
And best of all, I get to do that now that this huge job is done.
If I could lift my arms up in a cheering salute I would, but my muscles protest.
At least we were able to open a bottle of champagne to celebrate together at this evenings apero.