Getting life back to normal

   A cloudy day in Shropshire, and I’ve been getting back to doing some work in the garden, something which the total hip replacement operation I had in February has prevented  me from doing to the full this summer.

   It isn’t until life obliges you to do everything with a crutch in either hand, that you realise just how impossible that makes even the most simple job in the garden. Improving enough eventually to be able to work with just one crutch in one hand brings some tasks back within the bounds of possibility, but it still doesn’t make carrying them out very easy.

   At least I’ve been able to make full use of the recycled whisky barrels I bought last year to put on the patio and grow my vegetables in. They were high enough to be quite easy to use once I’d got to the one crutch stage. And the raised bed I bought a couple of years ago, though lower than the barrels, was still relatively easy to make use of at a time when I was still unable to bend down low enough to be tending things at ground level.

   There is a web site called Thive, Carry on Gardening, which gives gardening advice to people with varying degrees of disablement, recommending tools and equipment to suit the particular physical problem you’ve ticked on the drop-down menu, be it temporary or permanent. It told me that for my particular problem a self-propelled mower, or a light electric one, both of which I have been using as it happens, are the best ones for me at the moment.

   The site is worth looking at if you’re finding gardening physically challenging for whatever reason, be it permanent because of age or infirmity, or temporary because of an injury of some sort, or because of having an operation as it was in my case.

   In the garden, even if you’re only there as an observer not a worker, look out for the large clusters of sky blue, star-faced  flowers borne by Plumbago capensis, flowering in a sheltered position of some sort.  Though it will grow outdoors all year round against the wall of  a villa in Spain, Cape Leadwort, which I first came upon when it was used as a summer bedding plant in the parks in London where I was an apprentice gardener, won’t survive the winter outdoors in Britain, except perhaps in the extreme southwest of England. If you bring it indoors once summer is over, however, and give it a position somewhere with warmth and plenty of light, it will reward you by continuing to flower for a while, and if you’re lucky, by starting to flower again next spring.