Flower power

When I came to France just over seven years ago, I brought with me a collection of garden plant pots. Since then, due either to laziness, or I would say, lack of incentive, they have stood empty and forlorn outside my house.

But no longer! My neighbour, Chantal, who is a real sweetie, looked me in the eye the other day and asked what I was going to do about my empty pots. I mumbled a reply and she said, ‘Roger, you’ve got to buy some plants. You need some plants’. She was right of course, and she did nothing less than propose that we go together immediately to the nursery to pick up a goodly selection to fill the pots up.

And that’s why yesterday afternoon, in the full heat of the Sahara Heat Wave, we were outside in the garden doing precisely that. Rather Chantal was, because although I was there with her doing the heavy lifting, clipping back weeds, getting water and the more menial tasks, she was doing the really demanding stuff. Like choosing what plants were to go where in what combinations and gently packing the potting peat that we also bought, around them.

We finished off today after I’d ended up buying even more pots late yesterday afternoon to take all of the gorgeous flowers that we’d acquired the day before, and what a picture it has turned my house into.

So there you are, when push comes to shove in the garden, you can’t beat the tender touch of a woman. As far as I’m concerned, you can keep your Alan Titchmarshes and Monty Dons. I’ll take Chantal, my sweetheart of a neighbour, any time 😉