Photoblog, Friday

Once upon a time, Grit was not a mummy. She was a gardener. And every day she tended a beautiful garden. The garden was a wonderful place, stirring and breathing with colour and shape. Bold scarlet poppy, shy pink snapdragon, light blue cornflower, deep cream hollyhock: a magical place where satin-touch flowers of every shimmering shade would hurtle upwards to the sky and breathe into the air with their vanilla, rose and jasmine scents.

Now Grit is a mummy and she has a mud patch. There are skin slicing brambles, a wiry, giant's tuft of grass last hewn in 2004, and three children who dig bear traps, cover them with grass, and snigger. Then there is Glastonbury the gardener whose power saw bursts into early morning song three times a year to decapitate the privet.

But she is not complaining. Not at all. Because every day now she is working to resculpt those once exquisite hanging gardens. And she has help. Here is the help:




Here they are, helping.


And this is the help they did.


Fortunately, apart from the help, mummy Grit also has a determination with which you could cast iron spikes, a barely used credit card, and a garden centre five miles up the road. Therefore she has created this:


A few pansies in a pot they may be, but given the help, that's going some.