I really hope everyone’s having a lovely summer. We’re heading back to the desert soon and so I’m making the most of all the greenery before we leave. Here are a few of my snaps, including some details from my green-fingered mother’s garden. In a week’s time, I’ll feel like I’ve landed on another planet!
Note: Big white bird included on the request of Son1 who seems to have invented a new game, Angry Swans.
Edited using Picfx for iPhone and the photo collage website PicMonkey
This is a stolen term, from a writer in the Times newspaper, but I’m borrowing it because she was talking about a six-week British school holiday. Anyone reading this in the US or expat-land will be thinking, ‘Six weeks? PAH! That’ll be over in the blink-of-an-eye!’
Try 27 June – 2 September for size, presently yawning in front of us like a gaping hole – a mind-bending vortex that needs to be filled with activities, every.single.day, to prevent my children’s boredom from toppling us.
Happy (long) holiday, kids!
And because Dubai is as hot as Hades at this time of year, many of these activities need to be planned in another country, maybe even two or three different countries, if you’re going to get anywhere near the romantic notion of happy, rosy-cheeked kiddies hanging off the farm gate.
So, right now, we find ourselves in the UK – then tomorrow, we head off again, for our annual trip to the US. This year, to Florida, where we lived as newlyweds.
Something tells me we’re destined to meet Mickey Mouse and his motley crew, and obv. this means peaking far too early in the holiday, because when we return to the UK, and DH disappears off over the horizon to the blue yonder of Dubai, there’s still another six weeks to go. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Grandparents rock!
There’s also the small matter of keeping my newly founded Writing Inc. going – it has to take a back burner, of course, but still demands attention, at times like a hungry child. So, I’ve packed my career in my suitcase and, this week, worked remotely from my parents’ dining room.
With this as the view (mum’s garden, a 20-year project that was a field when we moved here), and sausage rolls in the fridge, it’s been such a lovely change. Best of all, the ankle-biting whippersnappers can be thrown outdoors for lengthy and wholesome, energy-burning games of hide-and-seek.
Office with a view: And by the time we get back from the States, the British schools will nearly have broken up – playmates wanted.
My 24-year-old self thought that entering neighbourhood garden contests was the preserve of bored, frustrated, curtain-twitching housewives with competitive tendencies.
It never crossed my mind that, 15 years later – in the desert of all places – I’d pick up a leaflet advertising a community garden competition that had been pushed under the door and put it in a safe place. That, a week later, I’d spend 20 minutes looking for the by-now-lost leaflet, and then, late one night, email a photo of our garden, taken when it was in bloom, to the organisers.
I didn’t even tell DH. I might have told my mum, who has such green fingers she could probably grow roses on the moon, and I mentioned it to Catherine the Great, who laughed. But I didn’t think anymore of it.
I blogged about our garden before. Previously just a giant sandpit, it now has real grass, brightly coloured bougainvillea and a selection of exceedingly hardy, heat-resistant desert plants. Like most families in Dubai, we have gardeners who come by twice a week, but compared to the lush oases that more horticulturally minded neighbours have created, our patch of desert is more Jungle Book than Kew Gardens. If I’m honest, I really don’t know one end of the garden shears from the other.
Inspired, I’ll be out there with the shears to do some pruning as soon as it’s cool enough
And they wanted to come round with a prize!
Twenty minutes before their visit, I was rueing the fact I hadn’t high tailed it to the plant souk to do some repair work. I took the picture shortly after my mum had worked her magic on a visit. Since then, the plants in the photo had either grown to Jack-And-The-Beanstalk proportions, or died in the scorching sun.
At 4pm on the dot, three people arrived from Dubai Properties, one of them a photographer with a long-lens camera, the other two from marketing. Oh no, I cringed, they want photos for their brochure and they’re going to be horribly disappointed!
I didn’t let DH leave. I accepted the prize (a solar-powered lamp) apologetically and we all walked around the garden while the photographer took hundreds of pictures, and I made excuses for the fact that a) it didn’t look nearly as clipped and alive as in the photo (but, look, the grass is still green!) and b) I didn’t know the names of any of the plants.
I have to admit, I did rather enjoy feeling like we were on a shoot for House & Garden magazine, but when their marketing brochure is printed, I won’t be holding my breath.
I can’t show you the photo I entered, unfortunately, as it gives away where we live, but I can leave you with a feast for sore eyes – before and after shots of my mum’s English garden in Surrey. As you can see, I’ve got a lot to live up to!
What my mum and dad’s English garden looks like now
And how it looked before my Mum got her green fingers on it