22nd March: this town centre garden used to produce vegetables and fruit. As children forty years ago we enjoyed cherries, apricots, pears and plums. We also had many strawberries and redcurrants. Nowadays the garden only produces a handful of redcurrants. Photos 22nd March 2014, Aurillac, France.

Water in the well is at least six meters deep (my string was too short to measure the full depth). I removed ivy from the right wall in February.

There used to be many flowers too. Fragrant pink roses, rows of purple iris, early hyacinths my mother put next to my birthday cakes, tulips…

In thirty years, ivy has taken hold of everything.

Ivy may have virtues, it still can be very invasive.

The ten pear trees died one after the other and were cut down.

We used to pick lily of the valley at the end of May, near the trees against the wall, left to the ladder. I used the old ladder to remove ivy from the tiles.

The old redcurrant trees were smothered by ivy. I checked yesterday: they have a few flowers. In the past there were beds of strawberries around them, on the 15×1 meter space in front of this South facing wall.

7th April 2014: today is sunny. Almost-wild tulip on carrot land. This is where I made my first gardening experiments some forty years ago..

It is now too late to remove the ivy from the big wall, as the blackbirds have nested. Apart from that, the big cherry tree to the right is almost dead and we might have a few green gauges from the plum-tree to the left.

The most obvious improvement to make at the moment is to cut the grass. I need to find a lawnmower.