Fences make Good Neighbours

 

Well, there were brambles reaching to over eight feet high with thick stems more than an inch in diameter. An entire tangled mess of them. They had started to grow in my next-door neighbour’s garden right at the very top where once there had been a rockery with delightful aubrietia and spring flowers. Over the years, the brambles had rapidly encroached over two thirds of the garden unchecked until most of the garden and the rockery disappeared from view.

There was a path underneath a washing line but both were abandoned as an army of brambles approached, and my next door neighbours solved the problem by stringing up a new washing line between the fences just a few yards from their back door.

The house was been rented and a succession of people came and went. All lacking the gardening gene or having far too much sense to tackle the wilderness that lay beyond their apple tree.

The last people to move in were dog owners. They had three of the beasts. We gave them names from Pokémon: Raichu Suicune and Entei. The names of three legendary dogs. Entei the St Bernard liked to visit our garden. He took up the entire space of our kitchen when he stepped inside. He also used to fall in our pond. He was huge with rheumy brown eyes, rather like Gordon Brown, and like Gordon Brown his slobbering face was always a surprise to see close up.

We offered no complaints about the dogs but these neighbours put up a fence. Effectively penning in the dogs, and cutting off the bramble wilderness beyond.

I asked if I could cut back the brambles and use the land there to plant vegetables. The neighbours surprised me by saying that I could. So as the snow fell I sawed away spending hours hacking them back, and burning them away; until eventually I had reclaimed the land.

I checked with a gardening friend who advised me to wait until the ground was warmer before planting anything. The winter this year in the UK has been prolonged and bitter. So even with the arrival of April I had not yet turned the soil preferring to leave it under almost a ‘straw’ covering of old dry broken bramble stems that I hoped would act like straw and speed up the warming process.

Then one day there was a removal van outside our front door. Without saying a word my neighbours and their dogs were leaving. After they’d left the builders moved in. Then the fence in the garden was taken down; and yesterday a group of people were working on the land that I’d spent the winter reclaiming turning over the soil in readiness for vegetables.

All my work had been for nothing… except to make it easier for these new people to manage their garden.

The garden was dug over so quickly and tidied up that I despaired at my own earlier slow laboured work. But The Teenager pointed out that whereas I was just one person hacking back the brambles, seven people had worked in the garden yesterday achieving the final stage of the transformation.

Luckily I had not bought the seed potatoes I had in mind to plant. I had, though, bought seeds.

So all my dreams of growing vegetables on a patch of land next to my own garden have been dashed…and I’m left removing the last embedded bramble thorns from my fingers.