The architecture of climbing beans

The beans and a few peas are in, chard on the left (and raspberries), potatoes coming up well behind, on the right a Brassica that I've left to bloom for the bees and self-seeded mullein which is a wild plant I love for its soft felty leaves and its pillar of pale yellow flowers to come.

All around the brambles, bindweed, nettles and couch grass encroach, while annual weed seeds germinate in the soil. Slugs and snails ready themselves for the banquet.

Drought is rarely a problem in West Wales but gardeners everywhere fight a rearguard action against the onslaught of nature on human intrusion. Which is why this poem by  Romanian-born poet, Lucia Cherciu, appealed to me, reflecting as it does my own father's lifelong battle with the elements to put vegetables on the table.

 The Sleep of Seeds

It didn’t rain all summer.
Instead of water, my father used prayer
for his garden. Despite his friends’ laughter,
he planted spinach and lettuce,
countless rows of cucumbers
in beds lined up meticulously
ignoring old people’s warnings
about the drought.
Every afternoon, he pushed his hat back,
wiped off his sweat,
and looked up at the empty sky,
the sun scorching
the acacia trees shriveling in the heat.
In July, the ground looked like cement.
Like the ruins of a Roman thermal bath,
it kept the vestiges of a lost order,
traces of streams long gone.
He yelled at me to step back
from the impeccable architecture
of climbing green beans,
the trellis for tomatoes,
although there was nothing to be seen,
no seedlings, no tendrils,
not even weeds,
just parched, bare ground—
as if I were disturbing
the hidden sleep of seeds.