danieldwilliam | And the Winner is...

…The Garden

I’m going to use my first LJ post to indulge in a little boasting about my garden

I say “my garden” it’s much more of a team effort and a community project, which I think makes my indulgence forgivable.

The Garden has won a prize, two in fact, in the Marchmont and Sciennes Community Council Front Garden competition.

We have won Best Wildlife Garden and been highly commended overall. I’m really, really pleased about this and very proud of The Garden and our award. It brings me great joy everyday to see it full of flowers, foliage, birds, from herds of sparrows to green tits and Fat Bastard Pigeons, squirrels and bees, hoverflies, ladybirds. I’ve even seen ants farming aphids. Worms too, lots of worms. The worms are particularly gratifying. Usually when I come home I am met at the bottom of the path by My Lovely Wife and The Capt’n and we have a little tour of what’s going in The Garden today.

Now, before anyone gets too excited about my status as a modern day Capability Brown I should explain that The Garden is approximately 12 meters by 4 and could be described as a fairly standard front garden for a middle class tenement in Edinburgh. It is divided roughly down the middle by a path, leaving two square areas for planting. It’s not huge and we’ve not done anything particularly innovative with it. We won’t be wining any prizes at Chelsea. There is also still plenty to do but winning an award is perhaps a good opportunity to reflect on how much improved The Garden is from its starting point and why I enjoy it so much. Oh, and to offer a few thank yous.

When MLW and I moved into our flat the garden was a desert. The flat had been a nursery in years gone by and the front garden was completely covered in a layer of black bouncy rubberised tarmac looking stuff. In places as much as a foot deep. This was laid on a float of concrete itself up to a foot deep. Beneath this was a decades worth of dead, dry dirt, lifeless and utterly inert. It was ugly and a waste. Dead.

Now, exactly four years later, The Garden is winning prizes for the things living in it. I flatter myself that hundreds of people walking past enjoy it a little bit everyday. I do. You can see the roses from the other side of the Meadows.

What I love about The Garden is

· It’s rewarding to see something you have set in hand come to fruition, to do a thing and do it well is a joy.

· Lots of people stop in the street to talk to MLW and me about it, and to compliement us on our hard work. This links me and my community to my neighbours.

· I get to spend time there with Bluebird and The Capt’n and MLW. Watching the Capt’n smell the roses almost makes me cry with pleasure.

· It looks so, so, so much better now than it did when we moved in.

· It still has potential to become better.

· It’s a puzzle that I have to solve. (Why does the Undead Clematis keep dying only to return)

· I think it has given ample return for all the hours of work that dozens of friends and family members have invested.

· It grounds me in my community and the love of my family and friends.

So here are some of the members of my community who I want to thank.

Cool – for all the digging and lending the enterprise a cache of style that it both lacked and benefit from

Zim LH – for the loan of the necessary tools

Our Friends in The Links – for tonnes of topsoil

the Sister – for digging out that effing great rock

The Very Practical Man for the gift of the current bushes (which made all the difference to the birds)

Random Canadian – for untangling me from the Hilte Hammer and showing me how to use it

Random Pole – for showing my how to break up concrete with a sledge hammer and a pick axe and Young Buck the Nephew and impressing the Polish girls he was with

Bluebird – for offering and then attempting to shift a whole tote bag of top soil single handed with a hand trowel; twice

ECA Artist – for taking the bouncy tarmac away and turning it in to Art, surprising little Art for the amount of the stuff we dumped on her

Curtain Pole and Rider – for quite literally tonnes of horse manure

The Wee Boy who wondered why I was bothering until I told him it was “for the kids”

the Nephews – (Go Deep and Young Buck) –for lots of hard physical labour, and mainly for the path on the right bank, looks lovely

Flyboy and the Shooter – for releasing The Nephews for hard graft and lots of advice and suggestions and support

Mum – for hard work, for collecting materials, for lots of advice and support and for sending us Grandma’s Jasmine and for instilling in me my love of gardening

Everyone who has stopped by and offered advice or support or just a few kind words

Jock and the Dog – for implying that if he weren’t on his way to an important appointment he’d be right there along side me digging away too at 70

MLW – for all of the above, for driving a van with two tonnes of concrete in it, for her blisters, for treating mine, for looking very sexy in ear defenders, for just buying random stuff and introducing me to fushias, listening to me plan things over and over again, for feeding the birds and taking such delight in them but mainly for making The Garden a priority for our home.

Thank you all.

DDW

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

widgetfox.livejournal.com

Much as I adore your other half, which is a lot, no-one can look sexy in ear defenders.

danieldwilliam.livejournal.com

You did not see her, there were ear defenders, goggles, and a pnuematic digger. There was much jiggling.

That's a little more information than I needed to know.

f4f3.livejournal.com

I'm tempted to post the picture of Damien and her power tool, but then I'd need to nip off for a cold shower.

Cue jokes about screws.

It was actually more of a very large drill. A vibrating drill.

Oh, that old saw.

It was a bit of a wrench.

I'm happy to stick with this one or switch to the other, but I am not doing two parallel power tool threads.

Ok, because you never want to strip threads.

I refer you to this post, your Honour.

Socket to me.

I'm only following your lead.

Careful, I have a short fuse.

Wire you telling me?

I thought you might want to switch.

Ah! Light dawns.

Watt?

I know, it's Curie-ous, isn't it?

I'm sensing some resistance.

That's a bit of a current theme.

Ohm not surprised.

I thought Joule understand.

It's my way or the Faraday...

Hallowrerr. Missed this entry in the hurly burly of hurly burly, and lovely to see you posting. I think I can take some minor credit for introducing wildlife to your garden. On my first visit, I was met with The Self Propelled Shoe-Box. Not sure if you were told the story, but apparently YLW and Marie had been chasing a fierce and potentially murderous rodent, and had succeeded, through great bravery and skill (and possibly ear defenders and goggles, although they were never mentioned) in trapping it under an empty Jimmy Choo box. It was up to me, as First Available Man to turf the wee cowering timerous beastie out into the garden.

HLW wears Jimmy Choos? This is a side of her that must be further explored.

(The pronouns are going to get hellish here, aren't they?)

I may have embellished. It was certainly a choo box though.

Feel free to embellish more on this subject.

I may well give tongue on the theme.

It's the sole subject of my interest.

(Although I am now having some trouble keeping this thread separate from the one above, in which tongue would have a different sense entirely.)

You'll be fine once you get into the groove. Dammit.

You're just full of all the vices, aren't you?

No need to hammer the point home.

I think you're all torque and no action.

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