I tidied up a bit this weekend – and immediately hit the gardening for wildlife conundrum. When is it okay to clear it up? What % is gardening and what % is wildlife? I couldn’t work it out so I did what I always do when I don’t know what to do and chopped some bits of the fuschia. I chopped some bits off the ivy too.

The garden feels a bit deserted and different – I haven’t been out there much for a long time. There’s a trod path to the cricket pitch and nothing else. It’s a bit like Moominland Midwinter, only instead of a wild landscape of its own with invisible shrews and Hemulens, it’s full of fox shit and fallen apples that have been half eaten by rodents.

I cut back the obvious things. I am pursuing the “leave stuff on the ground” attitude as much as possible but I wonder if I have reached peak stuff? How much of detritus can you have in a garden before it stops rotting it down? Especially as it has been so dry this year. We’ll see.

There are too many things flowering that shouldn’t be but here are 2 good things; toadflax (from Cawsand) growing out of a gap in the bricks by the pond and some VERY EXCITING fungi on on of the logs by the pond. If you try to move the stick, it is stuck in there.