Our garden starts in the spring with several trips to the nursery. The plants go in, watered and fertilised. The rabbits then clean up on the juicy buds and we start all over, but this time with some netting around the plants. The perennials explode with their spring colour and most of them survive the violent hail storms only to produce their seed pods and retire to a plain green for the rest of the summer.
We do our best to keep the weeds managed without using some man-made substance that is described in small print on the bag by unpronounceable formulae. The battle is constant, but we prevail - sort of.
At the end of the summer we just stop and let the natural environment help our treasures prepare for the winter to come.
Throughout all this we take time out to travel into the plains and up to the mountain valleys. There we witness, at no cost and with no effort other than walking, Mother Nature’s well-tended garden. We wonder if we should just move into that garden and call it a day.