The x-rays showed that I had done considerable damage to myself -
It was likely that I would be off work for a while. Accordingly, my employers had taken on contractors to cover my work. Two days a week, they told me, just to keep things ticking over. What they failed to understand was that they were grossly misrepresenting the numbers. They had taken on two people two days a week, which is four man-days. Apparently there were also two people doing my mowing which brings the count up to six days, and there was a third resident helper who was supposed to keep up with the watering in this very dry garden. In all, they needed to replace my 35 hours with seven or eight days work, just to keep the place 'ticking over', let alone coping with all the development and restoration work I had been doing.
A friend of mine came to visit very soon after I got home. He was the volunteer photographer who had helped us five jobs before, and he and his wife went out to visit my new workplace. He brought back pictures which made me very sad. Barely over a month after my enforced absence, I could already discern deterioration. My new borders probably still looked fine to the untrained eye, but problems were already beginning to creep in. The plants were growing away nicely, but I didn't like the working practices a bit, with debris on the lawn and bits and pieces of equipment all over the place. Gardeners working on their hands and knees in the borders too. My pet hate. You can't cover enough ground on your knees to be able to keep a five-acre garden up to standard. You need a professional efficient approach. It's not a hobby, it is an art.
And it may not be evident from that picture, but the Rose Borders were full of weeds. Remember how calm and uniform they had looked, with just the Verbenas and Roses? Well here you can see next to the paving to the right of the chair, in full flower, a Linaria, which although pretty enough, I always treated as a weed because of its tendency to proliferate. And sure enough, in just a few weeks it had. It was all through the Rose Beds, taller than the Roses, and threatening to take over, obscuring the whole point of the planting. It was degenerating with considerable rapidity into a poorly-maintained cottage garden -
This is how it should have looked -
The kitchen garden was no less of a disappointment to me, as my replacements had completely failed to recognise the advantage of growing in short rows, and had reverted to miserable tradition, having planted the beds along their lengths instead of across the width, forcing them to trample all over the soil to do any work -
I am sure it looks all right to most viewers, but I could not believe that in no more than five weeks my lovely garden should have so readily have reverted to type. To me it looked like it now needed restoration all over again.
And worst of all, I discovered that they had ceased composting the waste and were having it carted off in skips. Presumably they didn't have time! If they did the weeding standing up like bipeds, they might have found the time.
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