Flâneur Gardening

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It had been raining all of last week, so when I arrived at the house on Friday afternoon, the ground was pretty soggy and there were puddles scattered across the lawn. However, it didn’t stop raining – hard! – all evening, so when I got up Saturday morning, this was what the lawn looked like.

Needless to say, I wasn’t going to be doing any digging! Instead I rummaged around in the shed and workshop to see what the previous owners had left behind, and I discovered that there was a submersible pump in the shed, so I hooked it up to a hose and left it on the lawn for a few hours until the worst had been pumped into the little stream behind the house.

We’ve been discussing whether to install drainage under the lawn, but I guess this has settled that discussion… It’ll be quite a project, I suppose, but quite feasible, especially since we have somewhere to pump surplus water away to (unlike the gardens on the other side of the road, which seem to be even harder hit by flooding), so it can definitely be done.

I did sow some nasturtiums and sunflowers by the entrance to the garden, but that was as much as I actually got done all weekend, because the ground was still so water-logged that any digging would have created a small pond, rather than a flower bed. Oh, and I put some dahlia roots and some Abyssinian gladiolus into the pots in the small courtyard between the house and the annex, where they will be safe from the deer.

It wasn’t a bad weekend, though; the irises are blooming down by the stream and the place is lovely – though challenging and requiring wellingtons – even in heavy rain, so I guess my great plans will just have to wait a bit.

I’m going away for this coming weekend, but the weekend after that I’ll be up there again and hoping to make more progress.