Dulce et Decorum Est

With thanks to all those readers (i.e. one - you know who you are!), who have been demanding further instalments of this pointless rambling rectory story.  

Offending privet to the left of this picture

As I have mentioned previously, S's favourite thing to do in the garden is pruning.  Although in reality, pruning is too gentle a term.  The privet between the sheds, shielding the path to the unused back gate, needed to be cut back.  If you remember, one shed was re-roofed last year and now the other one is leaking and needs attention.  However, in order to gain access and, arguably, part of the problem, the long privet branches needed to be cut back, but not in a pruning kind of way.

S, aka Agent Orange*, did not mess about with secateurs or a handsaw.  He did not shape it into a cockerel or cut away the dead or overgrown foliage.  This was not clipping, snipping or nipping.  No.  He took his chainsaw to it and sliced.  When he saw S's efforts, our gardener (grand term for someone who comes and helps us weed for a couple of hours a week) described it as 'coppicing'.

Not pruned enough!

And it ended up like this.  Some may call it vandalism but I think it's art.  It's S's homage to the First World War centennial.  Our back garden now resembles Belgium in 1915.

*Agent Orange or Herbicide Orange is one of the herbicides and defoliants used by the British military during the Malayan Emergency and the U.S. military as part of its herbicidal warfare programme.