Bad gardening

Not for the first time the subject matter here will deal with some of the less palatable aspects of 'gardening' that we have come across. Soon after we moved in to our present house we encountered a range of unpleasant items hidden in our garden, things that took us many hours of toil to remove. We found it very upsetting to think that our garden had been used as a dumping ground by someone who had lived in the house, a carefree attitude that tainted our early days of living here. We overcame this gradually and since then have managed the garden on our own terms, relishing the wild look by keeping the grass mostly uncut so we can take delight when something new emerges unexpectedly and bursts into flower. We have had wild orchids popping up here there and we relish the thick bed of moss that covers significant areas of the garden. These are things that are normal for our local rainforest climate and they would simply not be there if we mowed the garden regularly.

It has taken a lot of effort to get the garden to a point where it is manageable on our terms. Which was perhaps why more recently we began looking further, beyond the rear garden fence at what was growing wild there, much of it very close to or in contact with our back fence and threatening to invade us. Our efforts to tackle this are once again documented here. Having spent many hours dealing with the gorse and rhododendron growing beyond our rear fence during the cooler months of the year this work slowed down when it became warmer and the midge season arrived. Much of the area we cut back has since hosted a regrowth of bracken and stinging nettles, plants previously hidden from the light. We occasionally try to tame some of this, with limited success, but in doing so it has recently exposed the efforts of our house's previous owners to spoil not just our garden but land beyond it as well.

Once removed from the ground this is what five gravel bags look like, all bundled up and ready to be taken to the dump. These things are used by building materials suppliers to deliver sand or gravel and on each one there is a note to say that it can be returned 'for disposal'. But clearly this was too much for whoever put them there and since they were tossed over our back fence the roots of numerous wild shrubs had grown into them which made them extremely difficult to remove from the ground. And sadly in the process of digging them out something even worse was exposed.

We now have the job of picking up a mass of broken window glass which was scattered there along with the bags, the remains, we suspect, of a long gone greenhouse or conservatory. It is impossible to remove every last tiny sliver of glass from the ground but patient work spent kneeling down and picking the bits up piece by piece with gloved hands has produced enough to fill two large buckets ready for proper disposal.

Admittedly the land beyond our garden fence does not belong to us. It is, however, wild and completely unmanaged by whoever does own it. It is a wilderness occupied by a healthy deer population who do nothing to limit the spread of the gorse but will nibble at any tree saplings they come across.

Then, just occasionally, we see this, a raptor of some sort (maybe a goshawk) pausing in the shelter of what is left of the undergrowth to dry off his feathers after a heavy shower of rain.

The hill rises steeply beyond our back fence to a rocky summit 170 metres above sea level and we welcome the view we have of this, especially when we spot an eagle or two soaring above it. But none of this justifies using the land to dump rubbish simply because it is more convenient to do so than to dispose of it correctly and we are horrified to think that someone would do this. It is evidence of an attitude to the world in general that is ignorant of life in any form outside of one's own.