WASHING TREES AND WRITING LETTERS

Yes, I have been washing trees - the white birches and the eucalyptus. Didn't seem to make much difference though. I read about it in a magazine - brightening up the winter garden.

Back to the mad garden again - it is November and brambles and woundwort are flowering in the hedgerows.

Though we have now had two frosts things are surviving and behaving irrationally? Despite the daylight hours get less the weather is still

unseasonably warm. Soon the southerly airstream will turn to the north and Brrrrr!

R weeded another bed and I have been muck-spreading again. I have put in posts in preparation for chicken wire netting - two beds are to be bunny free as I have said before. The posts lean out slightly to stop the cottontails climbing in - I mean it - climbing in. The guage on the netting is 25mm to stop the rabbit kittens (that is what they are called not babies) squeezing through. The bottom of the netting will have to be buried and turned outwards underground.

I have a very literary friend who is writing letters to dead (and some living) people as poems and I have just had the privilege to read one about Alexander Pope, a gardener as well as poet - brilliant.

Now, I am in a new knee situation so you may find there is a gap in this diatribe shortly.

Perhaps, whilst I am in hospital, I should write to

my garden and its inhabitants?

Dear grey squirrel,

Why don't you shove off and let my friends the Nutkins come back. I will be sending you a bill for all the feeders you have pulled apart and have asked the small birds to harry you.

It would not be so terrible if you did not eat their eggs and, when I catch you at the peanuts, you just hang there, challenging me. And then you have the audacity to scold me when I chase you off.

I shall set Doc on you, beware.

If only I could run up trees . . . .!