  The garden was lush, yesterday. Verdant. Sprawling swaying grasses and gem-green shining leaves. You could run your hands through them like hair. Tall blue flowers like thistles without thorns, skinny petals fuzzing their crowns.
Thickets of sticky, stinging leaves tangled with delicate lilac blossom. Fat yellow dandelions and their clocks that never told accurate time. A cacophony of weeds and wildlife and cat shit hidden in the jungle lawn. Seeping, cloying, oppressive life. We attacked it with inadequate tools, hacking at the grass with kitchen scissors, chopping out limp hanks that we threw in a pile on the sad concrete patio. The landlord had given us a flymo but we knew the fauna would snare the blades, snag the whirring wheels and choke the temperamental machinery. So we did it by hand, and with basic tools. A hoe and a lawn edger, according to a housemate. We pulled the proud dandelions out by the roots and they came easily, hollow stalks snapping with a satisfying hollow chonk. Handfuls and armfuls of vanquished weeds, clogged with dull earth, bleeding sap. It covered our clothes and our arms and our faces when we wiped away sweat. The plants pricked us and stung us, fighting back, so our arms rose in red bumps and scratches dewed our fingertips.
In the chaos I picked snails from the flowerbeds, one by one. Their whorled shells were dull, a camouflage green-grey, banded with brown, their plump grey bodies trailing silver. I must have had fifteen in my hands and they fizzed and bubbled and retracted as I moved. I put them over the wall, into the wilderness of our neighbour's garden, a rambling mass choked by brambles. Nature run riot. There'd have been no fighting that, with our value manual tools and our washing-up gloves.
We did a good job, I think, although the flymo defeated us and sits sadly next to the fridge. We lost a vital bolt and the whole contraption veered and shook. No-one would risk plugging it in, in case it ran out of control and sliced off our toes and gouged our shins. But the garden looks bare, diminished. Quiescent. I'm going to plant poppies, tomorrow. 
