Lawn sculptures

I’m hiding indoors. Yes. It’s raining out there. Again. Just enough to be really bothersome.

I could of course go out slug hunting in the potager. That just requires a raincoat, a rain hat and a mad gleam on the lookout for slugs.

But the lure of a soft warm dry seat indoors is too tempting right now. And the cat is on my lap and she looks so disappointed if I move.

Here she is modelling in today’s story.

Hunting goodness only knows what down on the lower terraces.

I managed to get one and a half dry days in a row so out came the new mower and off I went.

One session is of course just weed control and taming areas where you try to walk / work.

The road to the letterbox and the orchard.

But the other is having fun with this long narrow terrace below the house. In the early days it was just a jungle of mess. A sheep paddock. And harbinger of doom in the form of weeds.

Gad, those were the bad old days.

Once I had grubbed out the verbascums and done a few years of solid strimming of this huge space I started to get ideas.

Actually it was a cherry branch that gave me the idea.

I was beetling along behind the mower (still working after 17 years but petrol powered, so relegated to second best) head down, listening to a talking book, no doubt, when I was thwacked in the head by a laden branch of cherries. Apart from sustaining minor abrasions and then pausing long enough to wolf down the fruit within reach, I looked behind me and saw I had mown a kink into the dull straight row.

It’s a game I play during the months of April and May when there is an explosion of growth and you can really get a great contrast.

Plus you avoid mowing gorgeous wildflowers which is a bit of a heartbreaker.

Note the red clover on the left that gets a reprieve until it flowers, sets seed and flops.

I always leave this clump of salvia too. Way too pretty to run over.

And from above it does look like someone is having fun with the endless mowing with all this rain.

Wow, look at that blue sky. Makes me quite nostalgic for the annual months of drought. Which usually rocks up around the first week of June and relents with the biblical storms of autumn. I wonder if that will be the case this year?