Balance

 

Another diary post tonight, as the weather has finally caught up with the season's turn. Pictured, the far corner of the bottom garden, with the dilapidated old shed that I built with the help of my late friend JC back in 2003, just after we moved into the house. On the right in the foreground is the New Zealand Flax that I wrote about six years ago, during Covid, and not long after I started this blog. The Flax is flourishing, despite the enormous growth of brambles, lilac and nettles that surround it. It now stands eleven or twelve feet tall and looks in decently rude health. It forms a bit of the wilder part of our gardens, and is much visited by bees at the moment. I look forward to the return of the butterfly population after the the unseasonable dip in temperatures of late; they're another regular feature of our mildly unkempt but wildlife-friendly space, alongside the myriad small birds, mammals and amphibians that visit.

We keep enough structure, however to please ourselves, whilst maintaining what in former times would simply have been 'weeds'. I'll admit that some of our deliberate planting is non-native, eg. Rhododendron and a small bamboo, but the ground here is so poor - mostly slate waste with a sparcity of humus - that it tends to keep things in check rather than let them go mad. The most successful things, apart from grasses, are the mosses and lichens, which take advantage of the abundance of stone, slate and tarmac(!) that forms the top of our plot. All in all, though, the place is nicely balanced between usability for us and utility for the nature that it supports; a nice [in the old sense of the word] symbiosis of form and function: in a word, balanced...