Helen's Garden Renovation Project

We’ve had a few weeks of almost uninterrupted sunshine. I can’t remember when we last had a sunnier spring and summer. I have been falling in love with my Hebe, which is covered in blue-purple flowers. It’s a bit noisy, with all the humming going on from all the bees visiting it, but very beautiful.

Hebe in full flower

In fact, the whole of the side border at the front of the house is maturing very nicely. The Trachelospermum jasminoides (that’s the great leafy thing in the foreground) is just coming into flower, as is the non-dead Jasminum officinale (behind the Hebe). The foxes haven’t dug up the pulmonaria recently, and there is getting less and less room for weeds. All good. The magenta flowers at the end belong to some lychnis, which self seeds itself in different places every year – I even saw some in a neighbour’s front garden a few houses along the road. I think it prefers sun, so it made a bad choice growing at the end of the passageway, but it seems to be making the best of its situation.

The side border at the front of the garden

Dave, usually described in these posts as “my very patient boyfriend”, died on 12 April this year. I had been thinking about whether I should include this sad event in my blog, as it is meant to be about gardening and not about tragedy. But each time I think about my garden plans, and especially the pond, I think about Dave and how much time I spent discussing the plans with him, and how much we would have enjoyed sitting by the edge of the pond and seeing who could spot the most newts. Although Dave didn’t do any of the Renovation, he helped to obtain some of the plants and he was very much involved in the planning. When the pond is built, there will be other people to show it to, but there won’t be Dave.

At the time of Dave’s death, the garden was waking up after one of the longest, deepest winters that I can remember. The jasmine, which I thought was dead, started producing little shoots. The sun shone from dawn to dusk and the rain stayed away for days on end. It seemed impossible that anyone could die when everything was so bright, so alive, so energetic. I made my trips to and from the hospital, and still the sun shone, and I felt that surely Dave could not leave my life now, not when everything was beginning again.

But Dave is gone, and the garden is still shoving out more shoots than it knows what to do with, and the pond will be built, and the newts will move in, and maybe one day, when I look down and see my reflection in the water, maybe just for a moment I will see Dave’s next to mine, as if he were looking into the pond with me.