Day 2 - The Greatest Pest

Then there is the mole in his cheap velour jacket, conjuring mini-earthquakes in your silken sward - what is his place in all this? Does he rightly tremble in his subterranean labyrinth at the tumultuous echo of your boots marching overhead? Or the unconsummated rabbits skittering to cover at your approach, the pushy little squirrel alerted by your cumbersome and vociferous presence, and the white-rumped roe deer, the thief in the night, Vandal, Hun or Visigoth - all natural disasters attacking your creation. Add to all this the multicoloured aphid, caterpillars, earwigs, even the handsome bullfinch that strips the buds from your fruit trees, or worse still, diseases - honey fungus, box blight, dutch elm disease, take-all patch - the list grows year on year. Then comes the weather. Rain, wind, frost, snow, fire, all out to destroy your precious masterpiece without even a thought for the beauty you have made. You will find that nature has no purpose in your garden. Unless you can manage it.

Your garden is an artificial construct. Nature will pull it apart. You can't get rid of nature, but yet you still want your garden. You have the temerity to believe you can do better than nature. That you have the power to re-order natural materials and make a more pleasing picture. You can be god in your own patch, and you assume that right. This is not about the morality of such self-aggrandisement. I'm assuming self-importance as a given. What we are dealing with here is the consequences of that. How to make its impossibility work. Human arrogance is not something I feel qualified to take on. Some might see this as the greatest garden pest.