Looking back - 2006 and 2007

The older I get, the faster the years seem to be flying past. 2006 remains in my mind as the year when I got my first allotment, a year of sunshine and drought, and also the year in which my father died. 2007 will be remembered as 'the year of the floods' and 'the year when my mother nearly died'. I am immensely grateful that she pulled through and has recovered better than anyone could have expected.

I took on another plot-and-a-half on the allotment, and days later my mother, who lives in Vienna, had a fall and broke her hip. She's had cancer for a few years now and has no immune system worth mentioning. So while in hospital she picked up an intestinal infection and nearly died. She spent 12 weeks in hospital - from the end of March till the end of June. So for a good part of the year I've been going back and forth from Vienna to Oxford and eventually gave up worrying about the allotment (and this blog). During one week in July, while I was in Vienna, Oxford flooded. It was quite amazing. I left Heathrow on Friday, 20 July, at 7.35 a.m. in pouring rain. With the previous year's drought still on my mind, and having seen on the weather forecast that it was also likely to rain on the Saturday and Sunday, I was thinking, 'Great, at least I don't need to worry about the watering.' When I came back a week later, the allotment, the surrounding streets, and our garden, were all under water. Our house had only just escaped...

My mother has a flat in the city of Vienna and owns a little wooden summerhouse near the 'Old Danube'. When she was in hospital my sister and I did some of the basic springtime weeding to stop my mother from worrying about it and to encourage her to move there when she came out of hospital. My mother had started saying she would have to give up the garden and the summerhouse because she wouldn't be able to look after it any more. But when we showed her photographs of what it looked like she was so pleased that she did indeed move there within a few days of leaving hospital. The window boxes, the beds and the lawn were nowhere near her normally incredibly high standards, but you can see from the picture above that it didn't exactly look neglected either. My cousin brought us several trays of bedding plants in her car and everyone helped to make the little garden look cheerful, loved, and a haven of peace. And while England had a cool, soggy, wet summer, I had week after week of glorious sunshine! So I certainly can't say I suffered with those who didn't get any real summer this year.