Moving the Earth

 

Photo taken on the walkway outside my flat c. 1995, when younger sister Carol was on a visit from Australia

 Some people to take the contents of their gardens with them when they move. Apparently,  it's not uncommon to do this on a large scale.

As a flat dweller whose garden is in pots, I don't have that option. Quite apart from my 'start again' mentality, the plants would die in  storage  while we look for a new place. All the same, there's  a fair amount of spade, or rather trowel, work involved. Instead of assuming that the new tenants will want to look after my current crop of neglected geraniums I've decide to throw,  or give,  them away and leave the walkway free of clutter.

What to do with the earth from the plant pots was a question that
troubled me for a while The council sell garden bags for £10, I was told, and you leave them out for collection,  but how many were obtained for that amount I wasn't sure. Then my neighbour at Flat 5, who does the general gardening, said to throw the earth on a bank beside the garage block. Problem solved.

A  more interesting challenge is the collection of rocks on the back balcony. Ten years ago -can it be ten years?- I agreed to take charge of a rock collection  belonging to a Singaporean friend, a Mandarin tutor at Westminster University.(I'd known her some years because the part-time evening degree tended to drag on at my extremely slow rate of progress) She was moving at the time into a rented flat in North London and there wouldn't be room for them in her new digs. So I loaded them into my car and drove them South.  They may not look much in the photo, but they glisten and show off their markings when it rains. Now that L has a flat of her own we can meet up for lunch in Chinatown and effect a handover. Might take two trips with my shopping trolley, as I no longer have a car.

Unfortunately,  a number of the rocks have already disappeared. Every five years or the balcony floor is re-covered in bitumen as part of a refurb, and the last time I wasn't vigilant enough to stop a workman from helping himself to a few. What's the point of stealing rocks, you might ask, but these are no ordinary rocks. It's obvious from the photo that they are all very different, and indeed they were collected over a number of years from beaches and hillsides my friend had passed on her travels.  I hope she'll be so delighted to be reunited with them that she won't miss the ones that are gone.

The relationship the Chinese have with rocks is a bit mysterious, to Western ways of thinking, and  I'd certainly noticed that their ideas about gardens are different. Instead of a lawn and flower beds and maybe a few decorative bean rows and cloches, the Chinese like rocks - the older and more bizarrely shaped the better. Ideally they should resemble mythic creatures like turtles or dragons. Add some carp ponds with water lilies and a little bridge, a pagoda and some willows, and it's complete.

The domestic ones, as distinct from the tourist magnets you can visit in places like Shanghai and Suzhou, are of course on a smaller scale. But I  suspect they are less inclined to leave with their owners on removal day.