Garden lists

This morning I sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee and wrote out a list of everything that needs doing to bring the garden back into some kind of order, trying to divide the elephant task into bite-sized chunks. The list covered three quarters of an A4 sheet, and would probably have filled it if I'd included the stuff we've already done - which I was tempted to do, because there's nothing more motivating that crossing things off a list, but by that time I was tired of writing.

Looking at what I can't help calling the Garden Horror List, I pledged to tackle one thing on it every day I'm at home and feeling physically capable, in the hope that by the summer I'll be able to sit and gaze out across it with a feeling of satisfaction, rather than an immediate urge to run for the hills. We'll just have to see how that pans out, but at any rate I started well, by rejecting the temptation to let the very act of writing the Horror List count as today's task. Instead I went out and tidied the rose bed - not perfectly, but adequately. 

On a happier note, my garden bee list improved by three species over the course of the day, moved onto thirteen by first sightings for the year of Tawny, Ashy, and Trimmer's Mining Bees. I managed decent perched record shots of all of them, and also of a gorgeous female Buffish Mining Bee, but none was as enticing as these two Plumpies, enjoying themselves among the flowers. The little flying guy might have made top spot if he hadn't had his back to the sun and his face in shadow, the silly sausage (not to mention a pulmonaria stalk apparently growing out of his shoulder) - but a bee in flight is always worth posting, in my opinion, and especially one who's flying with his toes turned out so charmingly. The grape hyacinths, as you can see, are continuing to justify themselves, and I hope that they'll survive to attract Hairy-footed Flower Bees for many years to come.