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exhausting tasks: for example, digging a long line of fence post holes, pointing between paving stones or even weeding. This was fine most of the time - bar occasional rebellions when a members of my workforce downed tools and refused to listen to The Archers

. Garden twine where, if you open the cellophane package the wrong way then the loose end becomes strangely elusive. All of these things are certain to put me in a very bad mood.Not so tangles of weeds; I rather enjoy the gradual teasing and tickling

At this time of year hedgerows bristle with elderflowers. Elder (Sambucus nigra) is a native tree with white flowers in midsummer and bunches of small black berries in autumn. It is a bit of a weed but, like many weeds, it has both a purpose

It is a very old and trusted maxim that ‘a weed is just a plant in the wrong place’. I don’t know who said it originally, but part of me rather wishes that it had been me. The other part of me wants to punch whoever coined the expression

On Saturday I returned home after five days at the Chelsea Flower Show. As often happens when I return after being away at this time of year, everything has tripled in size, including the weeds. The winner is a rodgersia, which is now obstructing

the ones I have weeded or given away or sold at the village fete - which incidentally is next Saturday in Whittlebury, Northamptonshire. Hooray all round. (Unless you happen to live in parts of the USA or New Zealand where it is a pestilential weed

: there seems little point in weeding much (the nights are too cold for most annual weeds to bother with seeding themselves), why bother to tie back a sprawling plant when you are going to cut them all down anyway soon? Even the grass stops growing quite

One of the best looking plants in my garden this week is the Pokeweed or Phytolacca americana. It is always interesting when plants that are noxious weeds in some parts of the world are regarded as something interesting and unusual in others

would normally be permitted. Instead of a close-mown lawn I have ended up with a much softer, rather shaggy sort of arrangement. Different grasses, flowering weeds and even a small spinney of suckering Coyote willow (Salix exigua - which, while we

which is perfect for clearing weed out of ponds (drainage) and one with no wheel. Nothing fancy just bog-standard builders merchant types.The first recorded example of a man pushing a wheelbarrow is in a painted tomb mural in Chengdu, China (dated 118AD