This morning I lugged hoses, a garden sieve, a mat for kneeling on, rubber gloves, a large knife, and a muck bucket down to the far garden, and set about cleaning up the wildlife pond. This is a task that’s needed doing for at least a month, but which I’ve managed to persuade myself on an almost daily basis I couldn’t do, because I didn’t have enough time or energy, or it was too cold or too windy, or the moon was in Venus… or at the last resort because I simply couldn’t be bothered. The almost physical recollection of having gone head-first into the water during last year’s clear-out didn’t exactly spur me on either, and if I’m honest the only reason I got down to it today was the fear that if I didn’t, the thick covering of fallen leaves might end up suffocating the pond as the water warms, and killing the inhabitants.
As often happens in these cases, the doing of the thing turned out to be very much less troublesome than the anticipation of it, and within a couple of hours I had the surface clear of leaves and the spreading clumps of pond sedge cut back to a more reasonable size. By this time the weather was closing in, but I felt I was owed some fun, so I quickly put all the tools away and got out the ride-on mower, and managed to cut the grass before it began raining in earnest.
It was about an hour later, and I was sitting in the kitchen doing the supermarket order on an app on my phone, when something ran across my hand and I realised that I’d brought in a stowaway from the garden. This is the first 14-spot Ladybird I’ve encountered this year, and as they’re usually plentiful here I’ve been a little concerned – so I was very pleased to see it. But it wasn’t going to survive in the house, so I needed to get it back outside, and as the Ladybird wasn’t keen on being ejected I ended up having to juggle it from hand to hand as I walked, in a way that reminded me strongly of playing with the hamsters I kept as a child. Luckily it had stopped raining by this time, but all the patio plants were very wet, and by the time I’d managed to persuade it onto this ranunculus, so was the Ladybird. When I saw how much water it collected around its undercarriage, just by running across the petal, I felt a little guilty – but I think it will probably be fine.
R: L2, C8, D8.
