The Cuts

The lime trees in the garden were enormous; once they had been severely cut back - pleached is the word I think -  but they had escaped control  in the decades of neglect and no cutting back could return their shape or function.  So this morning the men arrived with hoists and saws and took the last of them out while they were deep in winter sleep.

The garden is flooded with light (and no doubt heat, come May) and all sorts of plants that had been yearning sideways and backwards for a bit of sun will get the shock of their lives in Spring.  So will the migrating birds who used to sit in the limes shrieking their little beaks off, having a rest before heading further north.  And as for the biting insects that thrived in the shadow and the trees themselves, they've been carried off  in the lorry.

The garden needs a rethink and a replant.  It's design was settled long ago and will remain rectangular beds with paths cutting them up like a Roman garrison town; you can go forwards, backwards, left or right in the garden - no meandering.  Some vacuous English planting will have to go  (when will I learn that Italy doesn't do  soft and muted?)  and it's going to be box, rosemary, lavender, irises in serried ranks, with pretty ornamental trees covered in poisonous fruits.  Even my quince, which is a local tree, has caught some kind of blight because it should not be in such a garden.  And the mimosa fought gloriously for years but is now a blackened stump, dead of cold.

This is not a country garden, despite seeing nothing but country (though scarred here and there with factories) from every window.  It is a city garden in miniature as is the village a stone miniature of grander hill tops.  So rigidly formal, sober and severe I must accept.

But I shall have a pretty rococo summer house, or at least a gaudy awning, to shelter me from the heat.