The style of garden is bare earth, to help prevent scrub fires, with quite a lot of fruit trees and a few bushes and plants. I don't know what most of them are called but I do know that we have olive, quince, peach, apple, pomegranate, fig, loquat, almond and cherry trees as well as various grape vines and a healthy looking passion fruit that has spread all along the fence. Some of the trees are so weedy that it's a bit unfair to suggest they produce fruit (I think there was just one cherry this year) but we have other stuff too. We have lots of ivy, we have a yucca that is taller than me, we have aloe vera type cactus and we have a bunch of trees like cypresses, mulberries and pine. We also have a splendid palm tree. I'm not much of a botanist though, my grasp of plant species has just four main divisions: weeds, flowers, bushes and trees. Maggie occasionally says something to me about pruning the oleanders or dividing the irises but if she were to fail to point out the plant in question I wouldn't be sure where to start.
My part in tending the garden is really the part that involves brute force or grim determination. Most of the time it's a controlled sort of physicality turned against the weeds whose tenacity and rate of growth leave me in awe. At this time of year I also water most of the non autochthonous stuff to keep it from withering in the summer sun. There's a lot of raking too; raking up leaves and raking up the fallen fruit. My other regular job is pruning. When I first pruned I was very careful. I would gingerly trim the thin branches using secateurs but nowadays I chop and cut with an Errol Flynn swashbuckling bravado and ne'er a care. The trees take no notice and simply grow back again. Well, most of them do.
This year lots of the plants look very unwell. The fig trees are covered in nasty little beasts, the grapevine on the wall has produced no fruit at all, the peach trees have some sort of leaf curl, only one of the three pomegranates has any fruit, the little apple tree is hanging on against the odds and the quince tree, which was splendid last year and produced lots of fruit, has a single scrawny example. Even our rose bush is looking a little sad and brown. It also seems that I've spent much more time watering, raking and cutting than I usually do over the summer. Apart from the palm tree which I have to spray every six weeks I don't usually spray; it doesn't seem like a good thing to do, bad for the bees and other small creatures that have a perfect right to their short existence. The fig tree blight was horrible though so chemical warfare seemed appropriate. Anyway my story about spraying six loads wearing overalls, gloves, mask and woolly hat from a 20 kilo, when full, backpack in the 40ºC+ midday sun, is, I think, quite amusing.
I got up early on Tuesday morning to do the watering partly because it's more efficient, water wise, before the sun gets to work, but also to fit in my various morning jobs. I was thinking as I did it how much I'd prefer not to, about how much older I'm getting and how physically punishing gardening can be at times. As Basil Brush once remarked a mix of three parts sand to one part of cement, spread liberally all over the garden, is an effective weed killer.
