No news on book this week. Instead, I’ve been busy tidying up the garden, which is satisfying but a little like the Forth Bridge, in that it looks tidy for about five minutes. Real gardeners go out and do a bit everyday. Me, I wait until it really needs a short back and sides and an exhaustive couple of days of good hard labour. Still, while sweeping up leaves we did hear a plop and there was the most magnificent frog sitting in the now defunct tadpole nursery. (A plastic tray full of green water!) When we first dug a hole for the children’s trampoline … because aesthetics are really important and I couldn’t face one of those large net constructions dominating the garden … and dropping it into a hole would make it safer wouldn’t it! … only the first girl to use it promptly jumped off and hurt her ankle. Mike doesn’t normally swear but he might have let a few words go at that moment. Anyway, that very first year, with our 14ft circular trampoline, (because it was on offer, I know you’d said 12ft but it was a bargain), we noticed quite a lot of activity underneath – there were 72 frog couples having a fine time. Mike spent hours carefully lifting them out and directing them to the pond, then building a rather swanky set of stairs which we never ever saw a frog use. Sadly, over the years the frog population has dropped, and the February frenzy has become a few sad ripples. To begin with we thought it was because the newts were in the ascendancy, they eat frogspawn, but they’re not exactly flourishing either. Hence having a frog nursery. No garden is too small for a water feature, even if it is simply a plastic tray once used for lego.
The trampoline pit is now a very nice sunken seating area. The long and the short of it is that I am definitely a form over function girl, which started the long journey from putting the trampoline into a hole so it wouldn’t be so obtrusive to marvelling at a rather gorgeous frog. Just put this down to the ramblings of a nearly 60 year old!
