Josefine’s Hidden Path

While I was digging up an old yew tree root at the end of the garden, I noticed there was some stone there. So I decided to dig a little and found a paving stone. Then some more! There must have been a path here at some point. We can use the slabs elsewhere so I’ve dug up a few. Enough for today because it’s a great place to be bitten by black fly!

When Astrid’s grandparents built this house, at the end of the garden were just fields. We’ve still got the base of the bench on which Josefine “Finchen” (long “e”), Astrid’s grandmother used to sit on out of the sun. Now, of course, it’s close to the house at the end of garden and permanently in shadow from the yew tree here hedge our neighbour planted when he built his house.

Obviously, the path was subject to the same kind of neglect that the rest of the garden was for the last 30 years. Removing the paving slabs should help the area drain but we’re going to need to plant some more trees that are better at managing the water that tends to collect here.

You can get an idea of what things used to look like a hundred years ago from the historical aerial photographs of Düsseldorf.