Bee careful

As always, the weeds are winning.  As the girls were happily entertaining themselves this afternoon and Ian had gone off to do some hunter gathering in Sainsbury’s and the Sony shop (though his laptop lives doggedly on he has to shake it occasionally in meetings to quiet the fan, which can’t look too professional), I decided the time had come to grab my tool bag and head for the muck.  Actually, as I did some weeding yesterday too, it was more a question of gathering up the gloves and tools and buckets I’d left scattered around the place, but you get the drift.

I am absolutely sick of the front flower bed and my bid to clear the ground elder.  One side of it is clear and I pounce on the smallest elder shoot, but this new desert I’ve created appears to provide ideal conditions for thistles and nettles so I’m not sure it counts as progress.   And to make matters worse, the remainder of the bed, weeds and all, is in full bloom with every purple flower you can imagine so I can only suppose I’ve dug up a lot more than ground elder from the now very empty end.

So for variety I sent off for new shadier climes today.  I chose the nettles that are blooming beneath the Indian bean tree.  The tree is looking fabulous with huge light green leaves and delicately scented blossom with boughs that grow horizontally (thanks to years of yearning for light from under the privet growing round its base).  It is clearly now a very happy tree.

I’d dug about a square foot, if that, of mainly nettles and thistles when I realised that the noise I was hearing was not electronic and in the distance, but something close to me, very close, underneath my fork.  Paying closer attention, I saw the ground was moving.  Not much, but gently, like the ground was breathing.  I didn’t wait around, but gathered my stuff, told the girls not to play in the area and backed off a little.  Then out of the blue, or actually out of the dirt, and apparently in front of my eyes though I didn’t see it coming, a huge bumble bee appeared and was examining his property for earthquake damage.  Or that was how it seemed.  We backed away and left him to restore his property.

I moved again.  Always more weeds to choose from.

Hardly had I begun when a few sharp cracks presaged the breaking of a branch from one of the plum trees.  The branch didn’t’ fall all the way (someone – Ian, I suppose – will have to head up with a tree to free it from itself) but was still a little alarming.  The second branch in two summers… I sense a pattern emerging.  It’s a pretty big tree.  Nothing like the sycamore that lost a branch last summer from several tens of feet up, but high all the same.  I could only just reach the tip of the broken branch as it dipped to greet me.

I tried to turn the moment into a learning experience for Oriana, explaining that the sound she heard first is a warning to her to get away from the trees.  It didn’t quite fall on deaf ears.  The drama thrilled her:  “Daddy, I was so scared.  It was very frightening.  It sounded like bombs going off,” she told Ian when he got home.  We get a lot of bombs in this particular backwater.