Two against the jungle - part 1

 We left our French house at the end of February, after a couple of weeks cutting down trees. I am a big fan of trees in  general and we have planted quite a number over the years, but these were almost-defunct cider apple trees which dropped their fruit every autumn creating a slippery mass of rotting apples, dangerous and unsightly. There was a time when our neighbours would pick the fruit and make it into cider, but the only licence to do this was held by our neighbour's mother who died recently, and our neighbours are no longer able to pick the fruit. So we decided to cut the trees down for firewood. Two of them we logged and stacked, leaving just the twigs on the ground. The third we cut and left on the back garden in its entirety, having run out of time. 'We'll be back in a month,' we said. 'The grass won't have grown much.'

How wrong we were.

For this was 2020, the year of rapidly-escalating infections and restrictions on movement.  In normal times we wouldn't ever have left our French garden at the time of maximum growth, but these weren't normal times, and we didn't get back until July.

The grass was thigh-high, dry and brown. My little shrubs were invisible, the bigger ones just battling to get their heads above the rampant growth. It was a daunting sight. Here's the whole cut tree as it lay 

     awaiting our efforts, and the view up the garden before we began: 

                                  July saw some of the hottest temperatures across Europe, and we spent a lot of that trip pulling dead twigs and branches out of long, tangling grass, cutting them up, taking some to the local dump and burning others before logging the big branches and the trunk. We did the whole tree and the twigs from one of the others. It was hard, rough work, and when we had done all we could I said, 'If I never see another twig, it will be too soon.' 

Of course that wasn't all that was horribly overgrown. We turned a blind eye to the towering hedges, but I couldn't let my old enemies the brambles get away with their takeover bid. This is what they looked like sprouting unchecked out of a small hedge adjacent to the covered laundry area:

The lower drive looked like this:

The vegetable patch was a tangle of gone-to-seed leeks and purple sprouting:

The gravelled drive was overrun with weeds, which over several days I pulled up by hand:

And even when strimmed, using the big wheeled strimmer because the grass was too long for the ride-on mower, it still looked rough:

But then our time ran out, and we had to come home.