Garden Talk

A Suffolk reclamation yard  north of where we live and not too many miles from the sea.   The owners specialise in dismantling old unwanted barns and rebuilding them.  The timbers in the pic are there for a barn in mid reconstruct. I love reclamation yards where you can stumble through brambles and fall in love with rusting gates and tractors.  We visited as our garden needs hard paving to go down some time in the future - not too distant - in our courtyard which is wallowing in the afterwail of builders.  Rubble, sand piles and broken glass.  The house is little, old and crooked and so any paving has to look as if it has been there forever.  I have some old Suffolk whites but need five times as much.  Old bricks of lesser quality are trading at £1.10 ex VAT.  There are about 36 bricks to the square metre so that is nearly 50 quid per metre.  On the drive home, Jewsons offered a price compare with round about £11 for a square metre of concrete pavers.  They looked all right in the yard but laid out back home, no.  The contrast between lard and President butter.   Living with builders rubble may be our long term status.  It could be a long old hunt.  Meanwhile, below is our readymade brick collection waiting to grow.