Garden success

The blackberry brambles are gone. At least above ground. I'm going to chase after their evil little roots and pull them out one by one. I'm going to enjoy it too, after the pain and misery they've caused me. I have scratches on me that make it look like I've done battle with a panther.

But even in the midst of my pain and misery I have to give those blackberry brambles some respect. They didn't go without a fight. And last year we did get 14 pots of bramble jam. Now come August we'll have to get down quick to the blackberry bushes on the back path to our local museum and strip them before the gannets in Moon Street.

So now we have a lot of bare soil where the brambles once stood. And I've done the stone age. I've made a stone circle with lots of different stones and filled the middle with gravel. In it I've buried a paving slab of coiled amonites for the budding archeologists. We also have a Native American Indian camp. This was easy, thanks to a large, flat, bramble-free space, a circle of rockery stones, three bamboo canes staked in the ground wigwam style, some wood tubes looking like totem poles from the garden centre, a couple of plastic snakes from ELC and the cut-out deer. Behind the camp I've hung the children's journey sticks, an idea we took ages ago from an art and craft session and which have looked brilliant ever since.

South America is there, but a bit weak in play value with some terracota pots rammed in the ground pretending to be cooking vessels and some ugly looking Aztec faces ripped off from an ancient windchime and stuck in the tree above. Fairyland is already in place, as is Buddha for the Far East, but I could do with taking the ivy from his head.

Tomorrow I'll hammer the badger in the ground around the English medieval garden. The children will have to help make the pennant flags with heraldic symbols to hang from the bean poles over the herb pots. And I think I can clear the area under the hawthorn and make a Celtic roundhouse with a roll of cane that I picked up a few year ago.

All in all, a day of achievement and success. But the moorhen's still skulking about under the kitchen table with no place to call home.