![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/daily_4\/3420_digging.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Of course this also means saving the weeds around them, so I’ll be eradicating couch grass here forever.<\/p>\n
![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/Black_beauty.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/daily_4\/3420_bags.jpg\")
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"