The Practical Soul

Chewed leaves

There was loss but also gain....

I wandered round my garden a week ago, mourning the loss of perfect shrubs and plants as the bugs and wee beasties had been having a properly good feed.  By the state of the leaves, I imagined them lying flat on their backs somewhere in a post gorge state of beastie bliss.

It didn't take as long as I expected to take off the worst of the partly eaten leaves and then the whole garden looked suitably recovered to be quite quite alright to look at again. I was resting easier again.

(As an aside....imagine the waste! Sometimes just one nibble from a leaf and then onto another leaf!)

It only occured to me today that what I've gained by allowing these beasties their fill from my garden and not spraying or picking the bigger ones off and 'disposing' of them, is a garden absolutely full of butterflies.

Quite quite beautiful they are, sometimes 9 or more on one particular oregano bush which they seem to like best, and they haven't stayed outside, they've come in to flutter round and out again while I'm sitting at my desk tapping away at my computer.  I'm so taken with this 'year of the butterfly' in my house and their capacity for transformation and beauty that I've opted for a symbol of a butterfly to beautify this blog....coming soon.

Upside down patio

As promised in coming soon...the tale of the upside down patio.

So, Duncan, lovely man, comes to give me a quote for relaying the patio.  The grouting is crumbling, the slabs are too far apart and it's never actually been the picture of loveliness I saw in the catalogue those 2 years ago when I moved in and decided it wasn't going to be OK for my son to trundle his bike through the mud on a daily basis.

   I needed a patio and grass laid.  I hesitate to say lawn as it's really not like that.  It needed to be less a striped and manicured affair and more a teenage boy friendly romping ground.  However the patio never quite lived up to expectations and Duncan now advises me that it's been laid upside down.  That is, the unfinished rough multi chipped layered sides have been laid facing up and the best finished and designed for show side is face down in the sand.

How ironic.  I've perhaps, unconsciously, done a similar thing with my ideas.  Keeping them face down in the sand and not letting them be exposed to the world in any big way at all. Interesting to find that my first blog comes in the same week as the patio expose! 

I'm looking now....is there anything else I have condemned to a life face down in the sand? 

Duncan is a good man and a fairly priced one.  I'll be rectifying the patio issue before the summer's done.  Can't be done in too blazing a heat though or it'll never 'go off' (Ibelieve is the technical term) and will crumble again.  An autumn project along with tree planting methinks.