The Wall of Water storm!

The English language is full of wonderful sayings – many associated with our favorite topic of conversation – the weather!

It’s raining stair rods! It is cold enough to make a monkey bite its young! It never rains but it pours! It’s hot enough to fry an egg! Dreak! It is raining cats and dogs!

Apparently, according to the patron saint of trivia – the cats and dogs image originated in the mid 1700’s when heavy rain washed dead animals down the street! Lovely!

The weather pattern in GA in the summer seems to be blistering hot for a couple of days followed by thunderstorms and copious amounts of precipitation. Thunderstorms tend to start around 6-30 pm just as CP and myself are sitting down to watch ’Escape to the Country” – a lovely program that helps people relocate – except the relocators never seem to know what they are looking for! Champagne aspirations on a brown ale budget! The most common complaint being ”the kitchen is too small” – well kitchens tended to be smaller in Victorian Britain!

Anyway, I digress. Last Thursday we had the wall of water storm – so named because you couldn’t see any cats or dogs,no stair rods, not even the road at the bottom of our drive – just a wall of water. Escape to the Country escaped for a couple of hours as the tv went into “ the reboot/we have a problem” cycle. I was in my office watching water overflow the gutters – like being at High Force! Anyway storms come and go – so did this one!

The first two hours of the next day were spent removing debris from the lawn and perennial beds then an inspection of the woodland walk suggested that about 12’ of the walks path was missing – AWOL- a horrible gravel garden had been created,by mother nature, downstream of the path. Now in the design of the garden a lot of consideration was taken in respect to drainage. The installation foreman and landscape architect consulted a couple of times and reached consensus – sadly about 15’ away from the true low point!

Through a combination of physical chemistry, biology and geography lessons and bad experiences of amateur plumbing I learned that water will follow the easiest route. Hence, the missing path was the problem but also the solution! By digging out the missing path, adding course stone for drainage, I could then rebuild the path in the knowledge that this underpath stream would protect the path from further damage. Genius!

The remediation efforts were interrupted by rain – more like the cats and dogs variety – just the tarting up to finish and then we will be ready – for the next wall of water storm and the test of the remediation logic. This tale just proves the point – you are never finished in the garden! Great fun!!