Gardening talk...

Slightly surreal this evening, doing a couple of hours weeding in the pleasant late afternoon sunshine, while a variety of thunderstorms passed by - almost constant sounds of thunder but somehow none of them ever came in our direction.

Weeding is, of course, the bane of any gardeners life (not that I'd go so far as to cal myself a gardener...), specially if, like me, you grew up only being allowed to do three sorts of gardening: gathering up the fallen apples in early autumn, mowing the uneven lawn (including under said apple tree) and weeding.

Weeding is even worse when your garden is infested with mare's tail.

Mare's tail is horrible stuff in so many ways. It grows like a mad thing, even up throw the middle of clumps of other plants, it laughs at any of the anti-weed spray you try on it, it mostly throws up individual stems (if you're lucky you may get two or three together) and when you pull it up (there's really no room to dig in our densely planted front garden) it (if you're lucky and it doesn't just snap) gives you what looks like a reasonable of root, which is fine until you realise that the main tap roots extend feet underground.

Oh, and it has supernatural powers of some sort. No sooner have you cleared an area and looked away to start clearing another patch than one or two (large!) fronds will suddenly appear exactly where you were just weeding, waving gently at you and singing 'la la la la...'

I guess we should just be grateful that plants aren't more intelligent - otherwise, they'd certainly wait to make their cheeky re-appaearance for a day or so to really rub it in.