This season’s big garden project: replacing lawn with a planting under and around the elder bush, and the new plum tree next to it. The soil is thick clay, hard as concrete when it’s dry and like a lump of glue when it’s wet, so it’s slow going. And the elder is not making it easier. The dogwoods on the left I can just push aside – even tie them up with a piece of string to get them out of the way. The elder branches just break when I push them even the most gently. I started cutting the sod with a normal gardening spade, but in the end I was crawling under it with a little hand-held planting spade.

The little patch of green that’s left right next to the elder should be a patch of white anemones. I know they’re roughly somewhere there, but when I looked for photo evidence, I could only find close-ups of anemone flowers and nothing documenting their location. At this time of the year they’re all gone, so I can only hope I saved at least some of them.

Of course this also means saving the weeds around them, so I’ll be eradicating couch grass here forever.

Here’s the elder when I planted it, twelve years ago:

And here are the bags of sod and roots and the occasional rock. The first one has been here since last summer and I am starting to worry about its structural integrity, given how much the material has faded.