I was out this morning doing light work in the garden until the sun got to me, and enjoying how marvelous and amazing it all is. It's not because of the roses, which have mostly finished, though a 'Dorothy Perkins'-style rambler was still covered with its soft pink double blooms. The general impression was certainly helped along by the maintenance currently under way. Yes, I have help! A young man who started a couple of weeks ago. He's good: a hard worker, reliable, thorough, and he knows how to follow instructions. He's not in the least interested in the garden as such--I've asked--but he is evidently interested in doing a good job, and that's enough for me. I've set him to weeding, cutting the grass, and cutting down the loathed elms in the woods. It's particularly gratifying to see the grass finally cut--it's meadow grass, with some clumps almost as tall as I am--and visual structure restored to the garden. Also, this is one worry the less: garden maintenance has been preying on my mind for a couple of years now. What a relief.

The spring bloom is mostly over, as I said, but early summer is magnificent in its way. The farmers have been cutting and baling hay; down in the plain, the grain is ripening, or ripe; plants wild and tame are maturing their seeds and fruits. It's a rich time. Unlike last year, this year our own orchard trees are fruiting well; currently we're swimming in cherries from our young tree (the fruit from the old one was stolen), and the figs look promising. That's most of what we grow, as I don't do spraying or irrigation. Oh, and a black mulberry. And a plum. And a couple of other odds and ends.

We got a lot of rain last year, and this year until in May, and trees and shrubs grew accordingly. It's good to see seedlings turning into saplings, and saplings into young trees. We have patches of shade now! And welcome, with the weather starting to turn hot. When we started, over twenty years ago now, the big garden was just sunny thin-soiled meadow; now we have young oaks and flowering ashes, the Italian cypresses and Leyland cypresses, olives, privet and lilac and hazelnut and photinia. And roses.

What are in bloom now are the clematis. They have a somewhat dubious reputation in the U.S., it seems to me, prima donna plants who occasionally die mysterious deaths, but here they're really tough. One clematis has just sat since it was planted a decade ago, almost invisible, but this year it infiltrated a rose and is putting out quantities of dusky wine-red blooms, double in the center, for the first time. Very cool.

The sapling oaks DH planted alongside the road oh, fifteen years or so ago, are now young trees. I want to start limbing them up a bit, so that in a few years it will be possible to walk comfortably under their branches. I take out the lowest branches every year, gradually, so as to avoid that lollipop-on-a-stick look.

The soil is awful, of course. But it's not as bad as it was twenty-five years ago. A quarter century of cutting the grass and weeds, amending the soil and planting, putting everything back in the soil that came from it, not to mention the hundred-tons-and-counting of old hay, and a few cubic meters of sand, have per force improved it. It looked flourishing this morning, though I must admit in many areas the weeds still have the upper hand; but they, too, feed the soil, and so in their way they're good. I'll conclude we're moving into another stage of soil fertility, and plant succession, when the weeds begin to weaken.