Messy

I must be mad.

I spent about five hours today completing the spring clearance of the long border in the front garden, and then edged it. If this doesn't sound like too big a deal, I can promise you that it was: in places the grass had encroached several inches onto the border - explaining why some of my plants had apparently decided to move onto the lawn - and it was so thick and matted that I couldn't get the edging iron through it, and had to use a spade. 

Despite the fact that I did the job properly, marking the new edge with canes and string, it is - of course - wavy. Because life's like that. The border now looks shockingly bare, due to the number of plants that have died over the winter, and it's still pretty messy with dead growth, like the leaf you can see in the background of this photo. So tomorrow morning I'll be off to the garden centre to buy some new plants and a large quantity of rotted bark mulch, to fill in or cover over as many of the deficiencies as possible.

In better news, there were several male Plumpies patrolling the border at various points in the day, and they got so used to flying around me to get to the pulmonaria and primroses, that by the end of the afternoon they barely flinched when I knelt down right in front of them with the macro. I also spotted my first Small Garden Bumblebee of the year (Bombus hortorum), but she was too quick for me to manage anything other than record shots.