A Rainy Day

Written by Daniel

28th May, 2013.

It was supposed to be so easy. All we wanted to do was to tidy up MAJ's patio a bit, and move a few troublesome bits of bamboo to more appropriate homes elsewhere in the garden. Now, before we started on this gardening odyssey, my knowledge of bamboo was roughly as follows:

• It's hollow
• Pandas like it
• I like pandas

As it turns out, that's not the whole story. Who'd have guessed, eh? The main problem was that some of the bamboo had grown in gaps between the patio stones and instead of the roots heading downwards, in the conventional manner, they had opted to run along, parallel to the surface of the earth, about 2 or 3 inches under ground.

But at the time we weren't to know, and so we lifted the slabs on either side of the first plant (stalk?) and dug down, trying to make sure we didn't damage the root. When we started to pull it up, we realised our mistake, as half the patio came with us. Not a great start.

The other problem, we quickly discovered, is that bamboo roots go on for ages, so it wasn't long before we'd pulled up half the patio and since it was raining for much of the day, it wasn't especially easy to put back.

At some point in the afternoon, Clare's sister Sarah arrived, to be greeted by the sight of me standing where the patio used to be, pulling on an enormous piece of bamboo root, which was still thoroughly embedded in the ground. Clare, meanwhile, was holding the bamboo itself, about halfway down the garden path. In a desperate, last-ditch effort to finally separate plant from ground, I told Clare to run down the path, in the hope that the root would come with her. It didn't, so we were finally forced to resort to cutting it, so that we could install the bamboo in its new home.

Having finally re-homed the bamboo, we then had to try and get the patio looking at least vaguely similar to its old self. Thanks to the now torrential rain, the garden had gradually been turned into a mudbath of Glastonbury-esque proportions, which made trying to level the flagstones even more difficult. Finally, we had to tie the rest of the bamboo back, so that it didn't hang too far over what was left of the patio. For me, this meant leaning back into the bamboo, arms spread (imagine if Brazil used Christ the Redeemer to prop up the Amazon rainforest and you'd be somewhere close), in an effort to hold it roughly upright while Clare and MAJ made good use of some wire we'd found to hold everything back.

Job done, and soaked through, it was time to head inside for a nice cup of tea. It was surprising to realise, when we looked at the window, that even working on quite a small area of the garden had had quite an impact.