Allotment pond update

On Sunday, when we had ‘weather’ I found myself wandering around the allotments with three very heavy, somewhat seeping, carrier bags. No, I hadn’t been nicking stuff (there must be a very special circle of hell reserved for people who steal from allotments, and I have no intention of ending up there) I was transporting pond plants to Maurice’s pond.

Maurice, I’m sure he won’t mind me saying, is an ‘older’ allotment holder. In fact he’s in his nineties, and his plot is one of my favourite places to visit. He has some very unusual and lovely things (like his medlar tree, of which more later in the year) and beds full of highly organised and productive plants, interspersed with flowers. He’s been installing a pond, with the help of his co-worker, Mark, and my contribution has been to divide some of the plants from my own pond for him. It’s not quite such fun to contemplate a pond in the drizzle as it is to stand around it in the sunshine, but it still looked great now its been bedded in and my plants: a water grass, a marsh marigold and an arum lily, looked quite at home within seconds of being removed from their bags and plonked onto the ledge.

He’s also been ‘donated’ about half a ton of ornamental stone, I’m not sure what it is, some kind of iron ore bearing rock, which looks very dramatic and I can’t wait to see how he uses it to shape the rockery behind the pond. I’m always impressed by the ingenuity of allotment holders.

Labels: allotment-plants, allotment-pond