SusieJ – this one’s for you…

…otherwise known as “The Garden Update”

This is what the garden looked like over a month ago

This is what it looks like now:

Some might call it ugly. Barren. Yes, it is that; but I also call it a clean slate. Because there, at some point in the (I hope) not too distant future will be a cubby house for the kids to play in, on stilts, with perhaps a few of the rungs removed from the deck, so Adam can build a little bridge over (he has his fancies!). Think bark-chips laid underneath. Perhaps a sandpit. Kid heaven.

Here, envision it all levelled out. Concreted (so the kids can ride bikes). Along the fence, and at the far end, narrow beds will be left for little runner plants, like mondo grass, or sea daisies or something. Behind the steps will go the big water tank we’re installing (which all of Australia is installing now, in these water-striken times).

This is what saddens me, though. What was once a great tree (it took two large skip bins to dispose of the wood) is now this stump-disk of memory, of waste. It had to go. When the men were cutting down the tree, they discovered that one half of it was rotted away in the centre anyway, and who knows what might’ve happened if it had been left over time.

Still, sad.