A Root Awakening

After a hot and sweaty Cardiff parkrun, Emma and Lucy headed for a quick coffee before running to the home of Mr E. Unfortunately due to a knee injury, Lucy only managed 2 miles of the park run and walked the remainder so they were running a little late but called Mr E to let him know and he said it was fine.

On our arrival, we rang the doorbell and Mr E opened the door with a little giggle. We introduced ourselves and he said 'I think my garden is too much for just you two'. We told him we would do as much as we could and that we might surprise him. He asked us to go through to the back garden and wait for him there. We had 2 surprises when we went around into the back garden; 1 - two cats lounging in the sunshine and 2 - a not so overgrown garden as we had expected from Mr E's description...happy days. The cats looked very unimpressed to have been disturbed and soon moved away, one hid under a bush and stared at us.

Mr E came out and told us he had once been well on top of his garden even growing his own vegetables. Emma having recently acquired an allotment plot was keen to talk to him about this. He showed us the weeds and brambles that he wanted removing and a little area he had tried to do himself but that it had just been a little bit too much for him. He mentioned his eldest child being in their late 60s and we were stunned to learn that Mr E himself was nearly 94 years old... he looked good on it, must be growing and eating his own vegetables that had kept him young! Mr E took us to his garage so we could get out the tools and Emma collected the green bin for the garden waste from down Mr E's drive.

Mr E went back into the house to sit with his wife and we got stuck in. Emma started with the secateurs on the taller brambles and grass whilst Lucy started digging out the deep roots and used clippers to chop back the smaller weeds. It was all too much for the cats (who Mr E said belonged to his next door neighbours) and they were soon off over the fence with a backwards look of disgust - Emma was much happier they were far away from us. Whilst digging, we came across all sorts of weird and wonderful shapes of large roots where Mr E had once grown his vegetables - one in particular made us giggle but that's another story! Mr E popped out to check on us and offer us a tea or coffee but we politely declined too engrossed in our clearing and digging.

Within an hour and a half we had filled the green bin and cleared an area leading down the path to some steps in Mr E's garden. It would be the area he would be able to see the most from his house and we hoped he would feel better about his garden with that bit cleared. Lucy fetched a sweeping brush from the garage and swept up the cuttings that had missed the bin and then took the bin back to the bottom of the drive ready for collection.

We called out to Mr E in the house to let him know what we had done and that we would let head office know to try to arrange another mission of runners to go out to him and carry on the job. He thanked us for our help and we bid him farewell before heading off on our slow jog back.

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