Regrets

I have wasted a whole summer doing someone else's garden. OK, I needed the money, and I will still find it hard to manage without it, but meanwhile my own two allotments have gone to rack and ruin while I have been wasting energy, time and electricity pruning bloody bushes, which only grow again, and look ugly anyway. Is there anything so useless as an ornamental bush that doesn't even have beautiful flowers like an apple tree or a hawthorn? Or as tubs of bizzy lizzies when you could have snapdragons and hollyhocks? Still, I've given in my notice now, and have approx. two months to get both my allotments cleared and dug over and ready for the winter. I am ashamed of the state of them.

Flowerbed

On a whim last winter I ordered some packets of mixed flower seeds, and threw them in with gay abandon early in the year in a patch up the top that I'd just cleared. They grew like wildfire, the cornflowers drowning everything else out, including the hollyhocks I'd grown from seed and planted out there last year. But one magnificent velvet red hollyhock has shot up through all the cornflowers and tall poppies and is reigning supreme over the lot of them at the moment, utterly stunning.

This was meant to be my attempt at a herbaceous border. I will try to be more restrained next year.