Dinosaurs Have Been Fighting In My Garden

Well, maybe not, but that's rather how it looks at the moment. Our friend Iain is a landscape gardener, and when we moved in he promised to help us sort the garden. On Sunday, he and his brother Al came round to start work on the garden. The plan was to take up the broken slabs from the area that we're keeping slabbed, and to replace them with undamaged ones.
Now, you'd think that the old slabs would be laid on a firm base of gravel or suchlike, but not here. The people who had this place before us were the laziest load of bastards on Earth! There's slabs, gravel, plastic, more slabs, wonky ground...
I think that the layers keep going down, eventually becoming the roof of a Morlock village. Either that or it has to be a strong enough layer to stop the demons getting out.
On the other hand, Flora thinks that eventually one of the layers just has to be gold, or that the weight of all those slabs will have created diamonds.

The end of the garden currently looks like this...





We're going to build a fence across the bottom of the garden (with help from another friend or two) next weekend, so we need to leave space to dig the postholes. That means that we can't relay the slabs yet, so Al and Iain are going to come back in a couple of weeks.

I decided to move some of the gravel to make an area where we could dump the broken bits of slab, and jokingly said, "You know, if I find slabs under the gravel too, I'm going to be hunting whoever did it!". I started digging, stopped, and called "You're not going to bloody believe this..."
There's gravel, plastic, slabs, then goodness knows what else under there.
We're gonna need a bigger skip...

Knowing how much Flora likes sharp things, I (possibly foolishly) gave her a pair of secateurs and asked her to start demolishing the dead evergreen, since we were planning on taking out all three of them anyway.
She set to it with glee.



Chris posing with the 'topiary'.



It was fun to do, as you can tell by the two grinning loons here...



We were on such a roll that we decided to carry on and take out the second of the trees in the gravel...



and the third one...



The garden looks so much bigger without those trees.

Oh, and we found these caterpillars. I have no idea what they'll turn into.



Finally, in surprise news, Flora barely managed to injure herself at all, although she did nearly take my eye out by waving an uprooted tree about...