I am at rather a loss this January. Usually I have little projects to undertake, minor improvements to the gardens and suchlike but now my main gardens are totally demolished my new smaller gardens are complete I am cooling my heals waiting for perfect turfing weather to come along and the contractors to finish constructing a new series of ponds which will gently cascade down the gardens. I would go slashing and burning, a lovely job at this time of year but on looking round, for the first time in my professional life there are no rough areas, no patches of wilderness, no scrub, no embarrassing areas called wild gardens......nothing. Everything has been cleared away with the JCB. I should perhaps be sad, feel a little regret but I don't, I have a fresh new canvas to work with, I can start again and there will be no dodgy areas. This new garden is going to be perfect and every nook and cranny will be beautifully replanted and thereafter wonderfully maintained. Recent talk about poor pension schemes brought it home to me that I shall never be able to afford to retire and so will be working here for at least another twenty years when my knees should be well and truly knackered. Therefore these gardens must be a joy to maintain and never be
allowed to get seriously out of control, I must be able to look after them then I am doubled up with arthritis and can only totter with the aid of a garden fork...... I think I am depressing myself now it all sounds horribly Victorian, shades of the workhouse are closing in.

What brought all this on was my meeting the gardener of an acquaintance recently. He is eighty six and comes to work nearly every day, by train, does pruning, weeding has a bonfire is given lunch, an evening meal with brandies and is taken to the station again. He looks wonderful, a picture of health, like a large garden gnome. I know that when he does give up work he will expire at once. Is this good or bad, I am going to give this some serious thought over the next decade or so.

At the farmhouse garden the new lawns are a healthy green now, they were rather yellow all summer being newly sown, there is still a mass of coarse grass growing through the fine and I. am spending any spare half hours crawling about digging it up with a hand fork. If I set myself an area to complete the job does not become to onerous. Any large holes I fill with good soil and grass seed and the results are very satisfying. When I was at college they always said that close mowing coarse grass will result in the fine grasses taking over, well all I can say is that it takes more that a season of mowing then because it did not work for me.

Since Christmas I have been able to produce a selection of cinerarias, hyacinths and bulbs in pots for the house. It is always so nice to throw out the gaudy poinsettias and turn to spring like flowers. It gives me such a lift to
fill a table in a bay window with a selection sweetly scented flowers all shown off on a carpet of fresh green moss. I am forcing ribes and forsythia in the greenhouse and collecting any twigs I find in the woods, which are heavy with litchen for these just plonked in an antique vase look just as good as any florists flower. Daisy and I went for a forage in the woods the other
day and I am still not convinced that she is going to have puppies this time. Some days she just wants to sit in the car and sometimes she wants to be out and about with me. One day she looks fat and the next time I look she
is skinny, it's the strangest thing. I think I shall just ignore her and if she
produces anything all well and good.