Beware the monster at the bottom of the garden

EVERY September the bramble bushes on the far side of our garden fence are weighed down with berries.

We collect them almost daily, feasting on crumbles, pies and jellies and never tiring of their juicy flavour.

And we are not alone. The dense thickets give shelter to all sorts of small creatures and are a tasty source of food for birds and mice.

I love brambles, but I prefer it when they stay on their own side of the fence, so I keep up a regular patrol of our boundaries and see off any invaders before they get a chance to become established.

Just occasionally, however, one will get away from me, sneaking under the bottom of the fence and rooting into the border.

I’ve just had to tackle one of these rogues and I’ve still got the scars from the razorsharp thorns that run up the length of the whippy stems.

Some plants mount even fiercer struggles for survival however and while I was doing battle with the brambles I remembered the time we were staying with friends in Spain.

For years a cycad, one of a race of ancient plants that pre-date the dinosaurs, took pride of place in their garden, but it started to take over, producing a succession of weird-looking flower heads that scattered seed as big as gobstoppers all over the gravel.

Before they knew it, their cycad had doubled in size and its progeny were putting down roots and strangling their irrigation system.

We were there when they took it out and it turned into a drama that lasted for days.

Stripping off the leaves resulted in numerous wounds and buckets of blood as a result of the vicious spines that run all the way up and down the trunk.

Then there was the job of digging around the roots with a pickaxe before – finally – it was ready to be uprooted.

Except it wouldn’t budge, not even when a rope was tied around it and we all lent our weight to the task. Eventually, we tied the rope to the tow bar of a car and used horsepower to finish it off.

The whole incident made me realise gardening in a hot climate is not a soft option and that while here, with our high rainfall levels and chilly temperatures, we have to cope with our fair share of persistent weeds, we don’t have to tackle anything that outlasted a stegosaurus.

And we don’t first have to check for snakes, scorpions or poisonous spiders before we put down a hand to pick a few sprigs of lavender, which in my opinion is also a bonus.

So what did I do while all this drama was going on?

I watched from the patio, of course, voicing a few words of encouragement when spirits started to flag.

And once all the heavy work was over I replanted the vacant space with pelargoniums and rosemary.

Both might sprawl a bit but there’s little chance of either of them turning into a monster.