Slowly but surely

A week ago lots of nursery mums and kids came to play and one mum told me I should definitely cut back the monstrous bush that was rather a gloomy presence in the middle of the garden.  So I began…

The bush is privet-like and dense at the surface so all I could do was to clip away from the outside pruning ever more until eventually I could reach further and further towards the inside and finally climb into the midst of it all to start hacking from the many roots that the bush had put down.

This (pic 3) was how it looked in the winter.

And this is how it looked part way through the hacking.

And this is what we’ve been doing with what I remove.

  

Slowly but surely, distinct trees are beginning to appear.  The Indian bean tree, one with a very black smooth trunk that is just budding, a lilac, an evergreen and some purply-stemmed flower that Oriana thinks - wrongly - must be rhubarb.

And to cheer me up in the middle of all the destruction, this is the spring just edging its way into our garden.