A little tree shaped miracle

A new potato patch...the soil is so hard and crispy due to lack of rain..proper drenching down pours are needed..I flit around every day with the hose pipe but if I stick my fingers into the earth afterwards its surprising just how little penetrates. The black membrane is part of my effort to suppress the weeds..mother nature has a way of winning through...hogweeds and thistles are such loutish thugs though..they bully the pretty little vetches.

My radiccio survived our extended trip to Italy but the neat little rows of lettuce seeds I planted next to them ended up being Chicken dust baths..hence the need to restrain the chooks in a pen!!! Naughty madams.

Above and just below are pictures of how the ground is very slowly, recovering from the drastic scalping earlier in the year..when the clumsy nitwit of a digger driver took out two of my lovingly nurtured young apple trees...a gift from my father. You can just make out how the ones that were left are blooming...still not very big but covered in leaves and looking good.

I water the bare ground everyday but the wild flower and chalk land grass seed is taking such a long time to burst into life.....and I am so impatient. Each day as I peer at the naked earth I spot one or two tiny clusters of wild flowers..mostly poppies, that rugged little survivor of the Somme...and yes more than one happy soul has likened my garden to that sad battle field.

Well...as I inspected the earth the scorched earth a short while ago, imagine my surprise when I spotted a small bunch of pale pink blossoms just below the soil...weird! I knelt down to investigate and to my amazement ..they looked like apple blossom..what was this...Persephone sending up a song from the underworld?

Yipes I realised...this little posy was directly where one of the apple trees had been flattened into oblivion.
Maybe some how the stump was sending out a shoot was my first thought..then on hands and knees I very carefully pulled away the impacted soil..and imagine my delight when I unearthed not just the stump but the whole tree...very manky and with only one or two leaves pushing up towards the light and like a little beacon, right at the very top the cluster of blossoms that had alerted me. As I gently eased it into the upright position and washed the soil from its..well not exactly branches as it looks more like a giant piece of asparagus than a tree at the moment.. I swear I could hear it whispering in a very wobbly voice.."At last what took you so long"...

So then I thought well..if one of them is alive underground..maybe the other one is too....and yes there she was...a little less under the earth than the first poor thing but horizontal and totally hidden by last years long grasses and mud.....So she too was hauled upright and washed down...and now they are improving visibly day by day.

This is the top of the first tree that had the blossom peeping through the soil. They quickly fell off and these leaves unfurled where there were no leaves before..just teeny bruised bumps. Pity I didn't take a photo of it fresh out of the ground..such a sorry skinny sight!

See there is even an almost proper branch with leaves on it now.

Hope sustains.