Nearer God's heart in a garden

Weird day today, as funeral days often are.

I'm not sure there's a good time of day to have a funeral. If you have them in the morning, you feel like you're not ready and if you have them in the afternoon, you feel like the sword of Damocles is hanging over your head all day.

Lise's funeral was at 1.15 UK time, so 2.15 our time. We got ready the music my husband had chosen for the UK funeral (not sure if they used it, actually, as his brother was having trouble downloading it) and took our tree down to the orchard and planted it. 

One feels a need to do something. And the tree, though only a stick right now, will be beautiful one day and will outlive the lot of us - a prunus padus coloratus, the purple-leaved bird cherry, which should give long racemes of pink flowers in the spring. The place is nice, too - opposite a rosa californica plena that fills the air with perfume. It's a good spot. 

There are several plants in this orchard now that commemorate someone or something or other. The yellow fastigate beech commemorates my late brother in law, who died of non-Hodgkin's eight years ago. Others commemorate our animals - a mahonia media 'Charity' for Worthing, because she was difficult and spiky but beautiful, while Lucy's grave is marked with an oak sapling. Lefty is under a birch tree, Coco is under an acer rubrum and Smudgie is under a photinia fraseri Red Robin. Similarly when friends have married or had children we've bought them Wedding Day or Happy Child or Scarlet Fire or the Alexandra Rose, to match the names of their children. I buy a rose where I can, but it isn't always possible. 

I've never got round to planting anything to commemorate my own mother. In life we didn't get on, and although I tracked down an apple tree called 'Mother', I couldn't find anyone who'd deliver it here and it's not available in France. And the time feels like it's passed now. 

Right, off for a quiet evening after a stressful day.