TRAILS AND WILDFLOWERS ON OUR DOOR STEP

We were aware that there were trails on the land between Tecoma Trail and Mirador but I had no idea how unspoilt they were, with more flowers blooming there than any other well-traveled trails I have been on in the Austin area. David had ventured down the bike trails which criss-cross both sides of the steeply wooded ravines that eventually drain the land into Barton Creek. When he came back with tales of beautiful pink flowers my ears perked up. The following day I joined him. 

 Too late in the year for the pink evening primrose I was trying to decide what they might be. Two fall blooming flowers sprang to mind.. Agalinis and palafox. I had seen both of these in my own wild spaces. Only about a mile away as the crow flies these were the more than likely candidates and it was the right time of year

I was right on both counts. All along the edge of the upper trail grew clouds of Agalinis purpurea, interspersed with dwarf Palafoxia texana but there are many other flowers growing there. Plateau golden eye, Viguiera dentata, blackfoot daisies, Melampodium leucanthum, Maximillian sunflowers, Helianthus maximiliani,Whitlow wort, Paronychia virginica, and liatris, Liatris,  Liatris mucronata.

 

I came so close to this roadrunner on the trail. I moved closer and closer and he was not going to move. I began to think he was harmed in some way but eventually he ran off in front of us. 

At one time an unpaved ranch road ran along the top of the escarpment giving way to a single trail which in many places branched off down into the ravine. David has explored many of these trails that head down into the ravine and I have now joined him. He will wander down any trail without knowing where it is going. I, on the other hand, am more cautious not wanting to get lost in there.

Hiking poles are really a great help as many areas are slippery and quite steep. I don't know who made the trails but we believe mountain bikers might have improved many of the original trails made by cattle.

At one point David points with his pole telling me that is where we are going. It looks miles away! He has a much better sense of direction than I and walking the trail it is almost impossible to believe that you have that you have reached the other side without being aware of having gone around in a half circle.

On subsequent days we went deeper and deeper into the area and at one point came across this. Someone has been very busy creating a ramp to make sure their bike made it around the corner instead of heading over the edge of the ravine.

We have yet to make it right down to the bottom where the wet weather creek would flow. There is no trail along the creek bottom which eventually passes over Lost Creek Blvd. Once many years ago we did walk an area on the other side of this creek and found a rusted out Volkswagen vehicle abandoned on the top. I wonder if it is still there. I know there are plans to eventually develop that area above Barton Creek and someone will probably end  up with that vehicle in their back garden. For now we can enjoy the flowers and the trails without having to get in the car and drive somewhere. What could be more perfect.

Alas! Our time will be short here. In December we will move to a house in Oro Valley, Arizona, and a new chapter in our life. It will be a whole new gardening adventure.

THE NEW PAD

When it comes to the garden that is exactly what it is, a pad of concrete on which I will garden for the next few months. It is a new experience for me and I am 'digging in ' with the enthusiasm of a die-hard gardener. Years ago, as I steadily added more cactus and succulents to my collection, I realized that my future probably held more of this kind of gardening, be it on a patio or in the desert itself. My cactus should be happy because now I can give them my undivided attention. I'll try not to over-water! 

 

They had a respite over at a neighbor's house. Some were under a car port some were under a persimmon tree where they were rained on during a deluge and then had leaves and dirt blown over them by a gas blower! One was blown out of its pot and across the driveway where my neighbor found it. Of course I told her not to worry as I apologized for landing her with so many plants. She is now taking quite an interest in growing succulents as she has been privy to several of mine flowering.  This one today, Stapelia gigantea.

 I told her how it attracts flies to its rotten meat smell and as soon as I see a fly has visited and laid eggs, witnessed by the small white wiggling larvae, it's time for me to snip it off and put it in a bag and dispose of it.

I also have one blooming over here but it is rather different. Not so showy but certainly very stinky. David was standing on the grass about 12' away when he said he could smell a foul smell. Is it dog poo, I asked, because everyone here has dogs and sometimes two, and most of them get a short walk to the grass while their owner checks their cell phone. We see it all the time. Once in the morning and once after work! 

 This is my stinky bloom, Stapelia leendertziae, black bells. It comes from Tanzania and Northeastern South Africa. To us its smell is vile but to the blow fly it smells like rotting meat and although it may be disappointed at not finding a dead rat it is a good place to lay its eggs. A stem was given me by a friend who had visited the area and I waited patiently for many years for it to produce a bloom. I will admit that I was mildly disappointed in the bloom but if it was the smell I was interested in there would be no disappointment whatsoever. It is much stinkier than the gigantea. Having learnt that it grows low to the ground I decided to put the pot on the ground so the flower would be turned up. As I put it down a fly flew out and a huge waft of foul odor reached my nostrils. That was it. Off with its head and in the bin.

 The patio has a wider section off the dining room doors and then this narrower section, which I have yet to fill with plants. We sold all our teak patio furniture at a consignments store  keeping only this small green plastic table and chairs and a couple of small teak chairs. We may be sorry some day in the not too distant future when we try to replace them and find the tremendous back-log of container ships goes on well into the future.

 I also managed to find a couple of pieces of metal art which I was able to fasten to the railing. Glad I kept those little green grocery store ties. They came in handy.

In the corner by the little table there is a shaded spot perfect for the house plants. 

It makes me feel more at home to have my plants around me. More to be added this weekend. Meanwhile back to the boxes.

A GIRL WITHOUT A GARDEN

There is one thing for sure. I'd better be getting a garden soon or I think I might wither away. It is no surprise to me to hear that the gardening world in England increased its numbers by over 3 million during the pandemic, as people found that gardening was something they could do even in a small place. Also, an increase in people growing house plants.  Even the medical profession is advising gardening to improve mental as well as physical health. 

 Since the end of August I have had no garden and I am beginning to feel an overall sense of desperation to get outdoors. With temperatures touching on 100° almost every day I snatch only an hour or so outdoors in the early morning to walk.

We have taken up temporary accommodation in an hotel in a very built up area while we wait for our apartment at the end of the month. I did think of bringing over a few plants but quite honestly there is barely room for us, let alone a few plants. I looked longingly at the flowers the other day and then realized all the vases were packed away in storage. And I glanced over the cactus at Whole Foods and was very tempted to buy this fuzzy no-name little beauty. But, no, I must wait.

 

Even the apartment to be has only a small patio, with  room enough for just a few plants. But that is just a stop-gap until we find where we want to live. The one thing I feel quite sure of is that next time my gardening skills will be honed in the desert.

You can't be a gardener without your eyes turning constantly to the ground. Right now I am having a hard time with what I see out there, much of it due to the unusually cold winter.  The loss of plants everywhere was staggering and it continues. Much has yet to be dealt with and I hate seeing it. I walk out of my room and this is what I see. I can barely hold myself back from putting on my gardening gloves.....I have no idea where they are... and getting to work freeing up this poor agave from its winter damage.

And although there is beauty in the skeletal remains of this prickly pear this is what greets me every morning when I walk to breakfast. 

Fortunately there are a few simple things that help to keep me grounded on gardening. The first is looking at photos of gardens on Instagram. As most of the people I follow post about their gardens and others fill the pages with beautiful photos of the outdoors it goes a long way to bridging the garden gap.  I am still reading A Vision of Eden, by Marianne North, and the amazing travels and botanical record of this middle aged Victorian lady. One day I will see the collection of her paintings at Kew Gardens.

But most of all I am hooked on my garden podcasts and TV garden shows, almost all of them emanating from the United Kingdom. Well, I still consider myself English. At the moment I am watching the Chelsea Flower Show 2021, and cannot get enough of it. I just won't let myself binge watch the episodes as I need to spread them out over a couple of weeks. I always watch Gardeners' World with the charming, down-to-earth,  Monty Don  and his pups, and listen every week to Gardeners' Question Time and Gardeners' Corner, with David Maxwell. 

Throughout the year Gardeners' World has been introducing us to viewers who sent in videos of their own gardens. Some were of children who has been denied their usual pursuits during lock-down and took up growing seeds. I thought they were wonderful. And Chelsea this year has several exhibits of balcony gardening. It's amazing what you can do with a little bit of creativity. They are certainly thinking of the gardener who is just starting out. And when it comes to design my favorite program is Garden Rescue, with Charlie and the Rich Brothers. If you are looking for ideas for your garden this is the place to look.

FAST FORWARD TO SEPTEMBER

 We closed on the house on August 31st and while I have no wish to relate at present the difficulties of the last month I will do so at a later date with plenty of advice for those of you who might be contemplating this kind of move at such an age within the next 5 years. I have plenty I can assure you.

I dread to think what the move would have been like had it not been for the kindness of my neighbor who invited us to stay in her guest house for two weeks. As well as that she made over half of her garage for us to store some outdoor furniture and the odds and ends of the last day. And.....to move over the plants we had plans to take with us. I needed some time to work on repotting and also giving away many more of them as our small patio, as of October, will not have sufficient space for all of them. I must choose carefully those I want to take. I had already given away plenty and a slew of pots. Two visitors said it was like an early Christmas. 

Naturally I kept my favorites among which is the A. demettiana Joe Hoak.

Finally this morning I went out to start taking care of the plants, fertilizing a few that have been sorely neglected and probably overwatering some of the cactus. And my plan was to consolidate some of the small pots into larger pots. One thing about cactus is they really like sharing and often look better thus. Take for example this little grouping. I had potted these together in the late spring and they have done well. This might be the only squid agave I am taking but knowing its nature it will soon be making pups. 

This Spiral cactus, Euphorbia tortilis, had become so lanky that it was flopping over. It was clearly in need of a trim and some fresh potting medium. I also paired it with some cuttings of ghost plant and an unknown agave. 

This is the ghost plant from which I took the cuttings. It was starting to make new pups and the older ones were also lanky a result of insufficient light. Light is difficult to manage in the summer unless you have filtered shade. Always the errant grass and one of this native portulaca, Portulaca pilosa, sometimes called kiss me quick. 

Although it is a little weedy it does make a nice little mat of foliage and flowers and is at its best in the fall. 

My idea was to try to consolidate many of the smaller pots into a larger pot to make future transportation easier, 

At the same time there are a number of plants that need a good pruning. It may not quite be the right time of year to do this but it must be done. I was fortunate to have purchased a few bags of cactus mix when we were in Arizona. Such an expensive thing to buy in Austin but 1/5 of the price in Arizona. I will reserve judgement on how good it turns out to be but this is what I am using. 

 

Even though the plants are mostly situated beneath an overhead it is still so hot that a few hours in the morning are all I can manage outside, and I must decide between walking and potting. 

 

 

I started off relocating some of the plants underneath a persimmon tree. I thought they were safe there until the mow blow and go guy came and I watched as he blew the leaves and bare dirt from one area right across the plants. Grhh!!! So now I had to move them all back underneath the cover. I must now take the time to remove the leaves with forceps and try to get all the debris from the Old Man of the Andes, Oreocereus celsianus,  bearded body. He fared the worst with his beard now full of grit.

 

 

Exactly why does America have such an obsession with getting every leaf off their path and soil into some hidden place underneath bushes. Or worse still into the road.
 

 In any event the two weeks went by so quickly that I barely made a dent in all I had planned. There is no real rush to remove the plants but I am in charge of care and that involves several citrus and plumeria as well as taking care of my friend's plants while she is away, and multiple doctor visits and on line bridge. 

 

Now we have moved out, and despite her asking us to stay on we thought it best to go to the hotel, plant-less! Except this morning she texted me to say the Echinopsis oxygona, had bloomed. I'm glad she saw and got to enjoy the ephemeral bloom. I wonder how long it will take for my old man to bloom?

 

 

I will go back there every few days to water and check on everything and think about exactly how many of these plants I can take with me to the apartment.

AND THE NEXT STEP IS

Every Saturday, for many, many months during lock-down and beyond, I looked forward to reading an article in the Daily Telegraph called, What Katie did next. Following a break up with her fiancé Katie had decided to leave her life in London and move to Cornwall. Driven by memories of her childhood she wanted a country cottage with lambs skipping around in the fields. That idyllic country village life most of us have seen on television. I know it well. She was to find the reality quite different.

Her search proved fruitless when several offers to purchase fell through. She moved from one rental place to another and from one village to another and found acceptance among the locals difficult. One place fell through because the surveyor discovered a mine shaft on the property. No mortgage on that property for sure. It is so much harder to buy a house in England as surveys often fail for multiple reasons(Japanese knot weed in the garden!) and there is often a chain of selling and buying that falls apart. 

When I started reading there were no thoughts in our mind about selling our wonderful house and garden. Then it happened. We bit the bullet. The house sold in the first couple of days.

I hope Katie's story won't be our, but the reality of it is that for at least 6 months it will be. We are moving into a rental apartment with a small patio with a view of a parking lot. There is a rather shrubby privacy hedge in the front. I may reshape it! We cannot get in until October so meantime we are homeless. For flexibility during that month it is a residence hotel.

We are not driven by a need for the countryside-wouldn't I love that field in England with skipping lambs, but for a need to simplify our life because of age. This is not a house  that comes with few demands. Quite the opposite. It was a wonderful dream 20 years ago but 20 years on our lives are not the same and none of our family are anywhere closer than 1000 miles. By the time we settled here they all made their own lives in faraway places. 

You know my style of gardening is never to throw away and to let the wilds take over. It's not a bad style because we have something here that the birds and bees and other critters want; food, a place to rear their young, and many do set up permanent residence. It is managed to the point that we do not have mosquitoes and can enjoy sitting outside at all times of the day.  I just hope the new owners don't spray everywhere. I must accept that is no longer under my control.

 

Of course I want to tell them about all the plants that are here, especially the seasonal ones. They wouldn't know about all the pretty little species tulips, Tulipa clusiana, Lady Jane, and all other spring flowers now dormant during the summer. Will they tolerate those spiky things like liatris or pull them out before they flower in October? What about this, and this, and that...and all those other little things that pop up. One saving thing is that a family member is a gardener so maybe she will help them out. Maybe she will tell them to wait  year and see what shows up before they begin to pull, because pull they will. We have always said that someone would likely come in here and tear everything out and put it a simple landscape and that could very well happen. I will accept that. We see it happening in our neighborhood at the moment and I have done it myself in the past (never simplifying of course.) When we left our garden in Toronto the new owners couldn't believe all the lovely flowers that came up that spring. They bought the house in March when there was still snow on the ground. I hope that is true this time.  

For the first week I did not vary my morning routine? Not one jot. I went out as soon as it was light and marveled, as usual, at how plants had recovered from yesterday's 100° The first thing I  did was to bend down and smell the sweetly fragrant bloom on the plumeria. No plant could be more forgiving than this particular one. Cut from one of my larger ones, in the late fall, and potted up in some soil and badly treated over the winter I watched as the growing points on the end of the plant shriveled. I didn't give up, and nor did it, and  slowly but surely as the weather warmed the pleats in those shriveled stems filled out and then small leaves appeared. Within weeks it started to make a flower bud. It was potted in a nursery plastic pot so now I decided to put it into a clay pot. It refused to budge. I cut with a knife all the way around the inside by the edge of the pot hoping to release it and pulled. Imagine when, to my horror, it gave way coming out with a tiny root ball and leaving the majority of those newly formed roots behind. Still, I put it in its new pot and watered well for a few days so it would sustain its leaves. Now a month later it is looking as good as new and is flowering.

Two weeks ago I worked on cutting back the cone flowers, Echinacea purpurea, which had finished flowering. I have never seen any birds eating the seeds and I had so many that it was not a hardship to cut them to the ground. They had a very successful season and many had outstayed their welcome. Can you believe I filled two bins with cone flowers and cosmos, each time standing back on the upper level to see which plant would be next for the chop.

 There was a Missouri primrose flowering one morning. It was the first one this year. The evening primrose and square bud primrose all flowered weeks ago and are finished. This one is a late comer and was happy for it.

And it wasn't long before I had a handful of 'weeds'. 

And that all seems so long ago now. In the meantime there has not been any time for me to get outside with the various happenings. I am so glad that we have had rain because that at least helped me.....or did it? Suddenly, I am aghast at how quickly weeds are growing and spreading. My usual morning walks would find me pulling small ones here and there so that they never grew to any age. Now they are monsters. I took a five minute break yesterday and was horrified. It probably doesn't matter one bit in the end because I think the garden is in for some big changes. I thought the new owner might have been interested in some of my garden "stuff " The big pots, hanging baskets, wall art, cactus etc. No response but for wanting me to measure the kitchen bar granite so they can order some new granite. How about the pots at the front entry? No interest. So I am resigned.

 Meanwhile,  I am hard at work throwing away, giving away and packing for two types of storage. Short and long term. A job that only we can do. It is extremely time consuming. But as I dismantle the garden art and the inside of the house I think the reality has really set in. Yes, we are still eating breakfast outside and as I walk through the house I stop many times by a window to gaze on the view. 

This morning I took down the Rock Rose sign so you know I have every intention of returning to the blogging world as long as you all are still out there blogging and reading too. It will be a time to catch up on myriad English garden visits and maybe a little of how things are faring on my little patio at the apartment.

TOUGH TIMES

I will preface this post by telling everyone who wrote on my Blog or on Face book that David and I have been been most touched by all the kind things you have written, as we contemplate our move. I thank each and every one of you. Garden friends are a treasure and have brought so much joy into our lives. David only reads my posts occasionally and I told him please read the comments people have made. When he did he became quite emotional.

I will never forget the day that, volunteering at an Austin garden tour, Pam Penick approached me and said how much she had enjoyed my garden when it was on the LBJ Wildflower Center tour. She gave me her card and told me about garden blogging and how much fun it was. On a cold and windy day over Thanksgiving I ventured onto Blogspot with no idea what I was doing. A name? How about Rock Rose?  After all, we do have plenty of rocks a few roses and of course Rock Rose is a native Texas plant.

Purchased at the Rock Rose gin distillery in Northern Scotland a few years ago, a stave from a whiskey barrel. How could we not buy it!

 I never looked back, joining the local garden blogging community and I hope that I will continue to look forward wherever we settle. We are not planning on moving from Austin just yet and will go into an apartment while we decide. It will probably just have a balcony so I will only be taking a few plants with me. Trying to find a place with the right sun exposure is not easy. Trying to find a place at all is not easy. What to do with all those potted plants and pots!

I'll be honest if the deal on our house and the 'back up' offer fall through we have decided not to care. But I can tell everyone the last month or so as we prepared and now the waiting is killing us. We have had to vacate the house so may times in the last week that there has been no time to get out in the garden which, as every gardener will know, would be a big stress reliever.

Two years ago our neighbors told us "Don't leave it too late it is very difficult to do" and we are 10 years younger than they were. Apart from all the logistics of selling and finding and timing, for the first time we are leaving something we created from scratch. From bare pieces of ground. Hardly a day goes by without a walk around the garden bringing me a surprise. Yesterday, it was this pretty little tradescantia, Tradescantia geniculata, given to me by Lucina Hutson. It has the delightful name of Tahitian bridal veil. Tucked under a yaupon tree I caught a glimpse of its shadow on the wall as I walked through the house. This is its first year in the garden.

 

 It is easy to forget all the difficult moments when a new flower pops up in the garden or a cactus blooms or a bird chooses to nest in one or your bird houses. This morning a clump of rain lilies flowering. This one chooses it time to flower. We have had rain several times over the last month so why did it just decide to flower this week. Just a few days ago Pam posted about her pink one blooming and I went out to look at mine. Not a peep. Now, here they are today and  it seems I missed two flowers yesterday. 

And an argiope spider with 2 fecal sacs dropped and caught in its web. It seems late for birds still to be rearing young. I wish I could sit and watch to see if a little web cleaning had been going on as one had disappeared a few hours later. 

 

When I walk out the back door lizards scurry in front of me as if to say " I can run faster than you can" and they can. It almost seems like a game."Here she comes" If the lizards start to disappear then I am thinking that a snake has been around. I know many people have walked around this garden during the day but have little knowledge of who walks around at night. We once saw a ring-tailed cat sitting on the kitchen window ledge at night and a skunk passing through early one morning. Foxes moved into the garden one time when we were gone for 6 weeks. Sometimes I hear the wrought iron gate rattle in the night-a raccoon or possum or skunk or fox maybe. Throughout the pandemic winter we put up extra bird feeders and I spent hours watching them. At one point we had to vacate the patio because a house wren built a nest high up on a piece of art work. If only they had carried away the fecal sacs instead of arranging them around he rim of the nest or sticking them to the wall. We tried to outwit the squirrel getting on the bird feeders until we finally bought the pepper-coated seeds which they won't eat. 

And during the last two years of cancer treatment and pandemic I often sat out there or tinkered a little. One time I sat on a stool and weeded. I couldn't imagine what it would have been like not to have had a garden.

I'm going to miss it all. As you can tell this continues to be a difficult time so please bear with me . It's a sort of release to write about it.

THE TIME HAS COME THE GARDENER SAID

Or I should say that both gardener and under gardener are saying the same thing and have reached the conclusion that the time has come to pass our gardens on to another gardener.

This garden has been millions of years in the making as without the most incredible limestone that we found on the property we could never have given it the bones it has. Millions of years ago Texas was covered by a shallow sea in which lived the creatures who made our garden rocks. On their death their skeletal fragments sank to the bottom where they were compressed over time until they formed rock.  A period of time of which we can barely conceive. We have been rearranging those rock on  this piece of land for 21 years. It has been a labor of love and we will leave it with a heavy heart. No doubt the next gardener will change the plantings but hopefully the bones of the garden will remain the same. 

 

Without the large ledge stone rocks that came from the foundation there would be no sunken garden or terraces in the front courtyard.  These rocks raised the level to the ground to bring in soil to give a decent depth of planting. Shallow soils on the Edwards Plateau limit the growing of many plants. Lime stone and bluebonnets pair so well in the early spring and look wonderful even without all my gorgeous agave which died in the wicked Texas freeze.

 And the smaller flat rocks I collected while building the house gave us the dry stone wall in the English garden, reminiscent of the walls built to divide fields in our native homeland. 

 Those same rocks were used to pave the patio area in the English garden. We have enjoyed many a breakfast here protected from the summer morning sun by the high wall.

We have always been a couple who liked to do things for ourselves and that would be very difficult to change. And yet we know that with our advancing years we cannot continue to do all. All those adventures up ladders cleaning gutters and checking our roofs need to stop. It is with an incredibly heavy heart we feel the need to move on to a simpler house and garden. We have adored our house, designed for us by Dick Clark in 2000. We had given him our brief and he gave us exactly what we asked for. The enclosed spaces outside allowed us to create the gardens. It was all our own work. We woke up every morning to a house with incredible light-filled rooms and with views of the outside gardens we created. 

 What will I do with all those photos I took of the garden and there are thousands. Just like my garden style I hardly delete any. So just like paring down the contents of our house I will get busy on that project. My computer will be so happy.

Bought in England I hung this little plaque by the front door. It will remain and hopefully will bring good fortune to the next owners of our much-loved house and garden.

ALL CHANGE

One thing that never changes in the world of gardening is the need to make changes, and although there is rarely a need to get them done with haste we really felt this one needed to be addressed at once. It is right outside our front entry.

 

The soft leaf yucca, Yucca recurvifolia, which had survived the winter and flowered so beautifully a few weeks ago, suddenly went into a decline. I know when something looks like this that there is no hope for it to recover and my biggest fear was that it had been visited by the weevil. Yes, they are not above destroying yuccas as well as agave. It needed to come out post-haste. David duly sawed it off at the base and used the pick axe to get out the thick root as I stood by. I was ready to gather up any weevil grubs or adults. But there was no tell-tale sign of weevils-usually a hole bored right up through the center of the stem. It's out and it will remain a mystery as to what caused its demise.

 

I pondered on what to put in its place. Another one? No. I had planted one there 20 years ago which died after 10 years and then about 5 years ago another popped up in its place. It is never a surprise to find agave and yucca leave behind some root with a young bud. This is what we found when the extended root was removed...in fact two young ones which I shall plant in another area of the garden. 

We had just had work done on the front entry wall and on the right hands side of the gate I had to remove a few native golden groundsel while they worked. I had asked David if he would just fill in with some flat rocks we had stacked on one side.

 Maybe do the same on the other side instead of planting. This would balance out the area. 

 We did have to keep the area of bull rock because there is a drain from one side of the path to the other. All in all a cost efficient solution.

 

I refreshed the pots on either side of the gate with dianella, Dianella tasmanica 'Variegata' and coleus. This is deer country and my research showed that these plants should survive. We shall see. I have never planted dianella before but I know it is used to great effect by many of my Austin gardening friends.

 Quite honestly the work we have been having done has been a nightmare for a gardener. At least here there was little for them to destroy but nearby is where they had a lot of equipment, mixed their product and then washed out their equipment. Not only did they trample all the native plants that had been growing successfully in the area but they threw their cementitious water over all the plants. My beautiful agarita, beloved of the bees and which gave us such fragrance every spring is completely covered with a fine layer of cement. It won't even wash off. Heartbreaking. I regret now that I didn't go out at the end of every day with the hose. To make the area look presentable David brought it lots of leaves gathered from under the trees in a more remote part of the garden. 

There is much more work to do in other places they have been working but they should be finished by the end of this week and we will have the garden to ourselves again.