I remain hugely grateful that John, the roofer, managed to fit us in before Christmas. The flat roof garage is now water-tight and ready for Winter and over the holiday, we managed to get most of the plants back up on top, somewhere.

Because the problem with doing this in Winter, and with a couple of guys who self-describe as “not gardeners, love” is that a lot of the plants seem to be missing, and not the ones you’d want to go missing.

In the Summer, there was an overabundance of plants. The roof looked positively busy and not always in a good way.

The thugs were clearly taking over: mexican fleabane (erigeron) thrift, satureja spicergera and some geraniums.

But it’s all looking a bit bare now.

& I can’t work out whether that’s because it’s Winter and all of those plants will just pop up come Spring and Summer, or whether the driest Summer in memory has done for so many plants.

The basic lay-out is much the same as before with wooden boxes creating a frame on the outside of the roof but any wicker dividers in the middle have just been thrown away to create one large central bed. Where specific plants could be identified, they were laid down on tarpaulin. The remainder of the gravel/plant mix was chucked into plastic bags for the ease and speed of the project.

There was a surprising amount of blue grass to be found – must be tough as old boots – so on the way back up, all of that was just plonked in the centre of the roof where it has stayed like a mini island in the middle of all of that gravel.

As obvious plants came back up, they were planted into the boxes along the outside with the obvious thugs placed at the corners of the central bed. I am imagining that they will move forward like little armies, gradually swarming into the middle, skirmishing with each other along borders.

But of course, the dirt chucked back into the spaces between those plants may well be full of other plants (weeds obviously as well) so that barren battleground may already be occupied.

John was a great roofer but less obviously a gardener – who sticks soil back into a plot green and growing side down? So we did do our best to revisit the roof and turn over the obvious bulbs, to make them head first again. And eventually we got around to topping it all off with some fresh gravel.

Since fresh gravel just screams “neighbourhood litter tray” to cats, we’ve laid down some mesh as a deterrent. My cats do not look deterred.

My cats do not look deterred.