Everything's Coming Up Roses

The three of us began our Sunday by visiting the lovely Mrs M, who's no stranger to GoodGym as she had some visits from us in the winter months. Our task for the morning was to clear the front garden, which had become quite overgrown since January.

Suze and I began by pulling out some tall purple flowers and a bunch of dead plants (killed by the heat, perhaps?). There was soon enough to fill a couple of black bags! James, whose height was approved of by Mrs M, tackled a very tall buddleia bush. With the tops bits snipped off, light came flooding back into the living room!

Underneath all the other plants and stickyweed we found several rose bushes planted for Mrs M's ruby wedding anniversary. They looked a little worse for wear but were still alive, and with the other more dominant plants removed we were sure they would thrive again.

Our final task was removing some white flowers that had encroached onto the pavement. This took all three of us a fair bit of time to complete, but we managed to cut everything back right to the roots. After that, it was time to clear up and leave.

Just before we were about to head off, I lost my orange secateurs and everybody looked for them for about five minutes, wondering if they'd been lost in the undergrowth. They were eventually located in a bag of garden waste...

We managed to make quite a significant difference to the garden in the time we were there, and hope the rose bushes get back to full health. A job well done!