I'm pleased you like the photo of our cottage...the droopy tree is gone now...it wasn't in the least bit attractive...goodness knows why we planted it there in the first place. It seemed a good idea at the time.
There was an enormous Pampas Grass on the other side...looking at the photo, the bathroom has the net curtain...then there's the sitting-room window with the bedroom the last one. I put this tiny sad little Pampas Grass right outside the bedroom window never expecting it to grow. It'd been a special offer and was practically dead.
It grew and grew like Topsy until the bedroom was virtually in darkness...it was there that the Hen Harrier landed one day and gazed at me through the bedroom window...don't know who was the more surprised, her or me...
So it had to go...murdering a Pampas isn't easy...but through brute force Himself finally managed it...shame really but it simply wasn't the place for it.
I'm not sure if I have any photos of the gorgeous rose which clambers over the wall near the car...it is I think, called a Galicia...which is a type rather than a given name...it rambles over derelict cottages and twines around crumbling gate posts. Dark red with a heady tea-rose perfume...
Useless for picking...the petals drop almost immediately almost as though they hate to be indoors in a jug.
When we first moved here you couldn't actually see the cottage...the front garden was totally over-grown with nettles and long grass...the front door hadn't been opened in donkeys years according to the neighbours...Mikey never used it...he always went round the back. We had to use brute force to get it open...then it never closed again properly and slugs used to squirm under it and come into the sitting room...
The windows were old sash type...the cords long rotted away so if we wanted to leave one open we had to prop it up with a stack of books...then Eilis sat on the windowsill until the urge to leap out became too much for her...she could jump over the garden wall then...we'd find her scuttling down to Hubert's to visit their dogs...
We'd have loved to have replaced the old windows with new sash ones...until we saw the price of them that is...
The cottage was thatched in 1911...from what I can recall of the census, there was only one house in the street which had a tiled roof and I think it was the two-storey which was razed to the ground when the people living there all died from T.B...the gate-posts are still in situ, but not a trace of the house remains.
I do like to think that the cottagers who lived here in our street gained some pleasure from the roses that entwine themselves in the hedges and grow over the old walls...even the tiny one-roomed place where an old man lived with his cow has those tiny pink roses clambering about in the wall close to what was once his home...
Their lives revolved around hard work from dawn 'til dusk with the ever present fear of being unable to pay the weeks rent...
I do hope they sometimes stopped whatever it was they were engaged in and bent down to take a sniff...perhaps cut a bud to wear in a lapel or brought a few home for the wife.
Sunday’s poem
The Cost And Practical Side Of My Shed...
