Ah, Spring!

It must be. Larry’s Levellers have just arrived.

Larry is our neighbour. Or, ‘The Lawnmower Man’ as I [fondly?] call him. He’s not an awful kind of guy. On the whole he’s pretty quiet (except for an occasional karaoke moment!), and it does turn out he has a bit of a sense of humour, and he appears to be decent enough.
But he has this ‘thing’ about his relationship with Nature.

When Larry and family bought the church next door, (of which we are the church shed), it had been owned by Celtic artist, David Rankine. (If you’ve seen my baby web page, I used some of his artwork to create the background paper.) David had spent a lot of time on the yard to the church. The previous owners, our original neighbours, had done the renovation from church to home, and had made a fair dint in getting the yard to match. David polished it up. There were rock gardens blooming with flowers and herbs. The boundaries of the yard were thick with peonies and yellow loosestrife and day lilies. (And we had an impressive count of cardinals and hummingbirds and other exciting species.)

Sadly, when Larry arrived, he kind of chopped it all down. And chopped it again. And again. There have been days when he’s mowed twice! Over the same area! Now if that’s not excessive, I’m not sure what is.

He’s weedwhacked, and trimmered, and sawn, and mowed, and mulched, and uprooted… To his credit, he’s also planted. But I’m not sure what all he put it, though I saw the pots, and so far nothing recognizable or even tangible seems to have happened.
Perhaps, if I saw his plan? I’m assuming there’s some goal in mind… Except I don’t really see him gardening. He’s not someone who waters or weeds or deadheads or admires. Mowing seems to be his thing. Yet we have a short growing season, and in the later part of summer, it’s very dry here. If he was hoping for that putting green lawn, it isn’t going to happen.

And instead, my heart breaks for all the lovely day lilies, which are so beautifully established on that front slope up to the road. And I yearn for all the lovely cedary visual barrier between the two properties. If nothing else it meant that the ‘yarkie’ dogs would only yark when they heard us, not also when they saw us.

Larry did, at least, put a little wooden tool shed in between the two yards, and it’s not extraordinarily ugly. So that’s somewhat helpful. And when my withy fence gets a bit more established, and second bit gets built, it will help distract the eye from the four or five wheelbarrows behind the shed.

But here I am, hankering after every living, growing and flowering thing, checking them faithfully day after day, and Larry, I guess, sees no charm in them at all. The grass is always greener….?