When it comes to gardening chez nous (or indeed cleaning but that is another story) there is no doubt about who is the boss and indeed harder worker ; it is Síle.

Whereas I will retire to the kitchen and sulk when life becomes too much for me Síle retires to the garden- and there performs miracles.

This is a picture of our garden as we first saw it nearly six years ago- not a lot of promise there.
A lot of people would have thrown up their hands, called in a man and a rotavator and started again from scratch.

Not our Síle.

She felt, correctly, that underneath this wilderness of weeds lay a structured garden, created and loved by the various encumbants of the house, the priests, the housekeepers and latterly the three sisters who were the last vestiges of the church here.

With some help from D’s boyfriend Ano, she started to clear the wilderness.
A secret garden gradually appeared, all laid out in little paths outlined by stones, and planted with all manner of shrubs and flowers.
For the last five years she has mantained, weeded, watered and loved the garden , despite having to relearn every thing she had learned in Ireland- plants here by the Mediterranean behaved in totally different ways, exotics became easily nurtured, commomplace Irish standby plants became exotics.
That which the drought and the extreme summer heat did not kill the sudden and unexpected frosts of winter did.
In short every aspect of gardening is more difficult out here.

In all this time my principal role in the proceedings was to be occasionally called in for the heavier lifting and to try and help with sorting out the long term problem about how to make the place more visitor friendly.

Every year brought a different solution, the stone paving , when priced, was way above our means,sowing with grass seed, we were warned from the start, was a long uphill battle with the elements during the summer, gravel was affordable but really hard on the feet and on small grandsons knees, a wooden patio would be totally out of keeping with the stone walls which surrounded it.

It was when Síle started in desperation, to vaguely contemplate the awful possibility of laying an artificial lawn (amazingly common out here) that she realised that there was yet another possibility, that of laying an already grassed lawn of turf sods.

So now this is where we stand, a square in the centre of the ground has been cleared (leaving standing our old (possibly on its last legs) pink Oleander.
This has been dug over and now must be further aerated and then levelled.
We then must order our sods (the cost coming in at an affordable €3.50 per square metre, we need about 12) then collect and lay these.

I will keep you informed as to our progress.