Dead-Heading the Roses by the Garden Gate

That doesn’t mean that that the garden gate wrote this! Only that the roses that needed dead-heading are by the garden gate.

I’d just got up, hadn’t even had a cup of tea when I was suddenly struck by the urgency of the requirement to ‘dead-head’ those roses by the front, garden gate. They are truly lovely roses, a beautiful, pale yellow with a scent that would make Mr Chanel jealous.

 But once they’re ‘over’ they’re like Cinderella after midnight, they need to disappear. 

I put on some shoes and walked down the back garden path to get the plastic basket that serves as a trug. It was full. Full of dying bits of plants that our lady-gardener had failed to empty onto the compost heap. So, sighingly adding yet one more to the lengthy list of chores that I’m responsible for, I picked up the basket and walked to the gate in the fence behind the garage which opens into a little copse. Well, actually it’s a few trees bigger than a little copse, I think. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines a copse as a small group of trees. Google doesn’t even know what a copse is!

Anyway, this group of trees is like a giant hedge, about four-hundred yards long and anything from fifteen to thirty yards thick and I can’t find a descriptive word that fits between copses and woods, but by now you’ll know what I’m talking about.

I looked through the fence. It was immediately obvious why the gardener hadn’t emptied the plastic trug. A little way beyond the gate there is a branch-path (in the sense of a branch-line of a railway network) which leads off the main path to the compost heap. The branch-path was impassable. Stingers have been prolific this year – here they were four feet high, leaning in over the path from both sides: jagged leaves, bristling with poisonous barbs, looking at me, smiling, waiting…

“Ha!” I said, “You don’t scare me!”

Not true of course, bravado. At least until I’ve got some protective clothing on.

I went back into the shed, dug out my wellies from under the workbench, behind two bicycles, asking myself as I did so why they can’t be kept in the middle of the shed floor where I’d left them the last time I used them. My stuff is always disappearing into drawers and cupboards. Anyway, that’s another matter.

I checked my wellies, for scorpions, by turning them, one-by-one, upside down and banging them on the floor – a habit I picked up in Oman when I worked there. Sometimes, it was believed, scorpions would crawl into one of your boots while you slept, with the intention of attacking your foot with a fatal sting when you put it in it in the morning (maybe that’s where the expression comes from?). Anyway, it’s worked for me all these years, I’ve never found a scorpion in any of my boots.

As well as putting my boots on I took thick gloves from the glove box and unhooked the old combat jacket that hangs on a nail in the shed wall and put them on. The issue with the nettles was going to be combat.

Armoured now, I turned the wheels in the combination lock, opened the gate and went through.

This time the nettles didn’t look quite so bloodthirsty, they’d lost a bit of their confidence. Quite right, I was dressed to kill.

I grasped the first three stems (traditional: ‘grasping the nettle’(s)) and pulled them out of the ground. They, and the rest of the avenue, and the dead and dying plants in the plastic trug raised the level of the compost heap a little higher.

Then, as I walked back along the branch path. I couldn’t help noticing that the main path – which leads on through the copse to the field beyond – was also overgrown and needed cutting back.

‘Well’ I thought, ‘I’m dressed for it!’ So that’s what I did next. It wasn’t a quick job. As well as nettles there were brambles, clumps of a fast-spreading, variegated green and white grass, ‘sticky’ chick-weed and even young trees.

Before I finished the cook called me in for breakfast.

I’ll dead-head the roses by the front gate tomorrow.