Daisies and Other Garden Matters

Due to the grottiness of my cold upon waking, it took me quite a while to get going this morning. I spent ages coughing and nose-blowing to clear my head.

As it was dry and periodically sunny today, I chose to spend time doing more much-needed basic clearing in the back garden and driveway. First I cut away more of the brambles from the borders, which has made quite an improvement. Then I deadheaded the big climbing yellow rose by the front door, which took ages because there have been, and still are, so many blooms on it. It’s the only maintenance I do assiduously to any of the roses, and it definitely makes a difference to their productivity. Next I cut last year’s dead and dried out stems from the self-seeded Rose Campion growing along the driveway’s fence line - again this makes it look a lot better and less neglected. There will soon be lots of pretty bright pink flowers coming out on that. Finally, I got a flat trowel and scraped up the worst of the thick moss which had accumulated at the garage end of the drive. It was bone dry, and came up quite easily. I will need to sweep it vigorously with a stiff broom to get the rest up, but by now I was nearly passing out struggling for breath because of the cold virus affecting my chest and lungs. I think I did more work than I should have.

Just after 5pm I drove up to the hand car wash on the edge of the village, as I was ashamed of my car looking grubby when I’m giving three friends a lift tomorrow for a day out (more of that in my next blip instalment). I know it’s forecast to rain (and even thunder), but at least the car will start out clean and has now had some wax applied against all the raindrops.

On the way back home, I noticed the pink and white daisies planted in the troughs next to The Centre car park in the village. I was going to try taking a photo of the 1960’s pseudo-Brutalist style shops there for today’s WidWed challenge (this bit of Tiptree is sadly not the prettiest spot in the village), but in the end I thought the daisies were much easier on the eye and they won out!