This photo is of emerging buds on one of the trees we planted in November 2007. It took us a lot of blood, sweat and tears to plant out our trees and to be honest, we’ve had mixed success. The hazels, which should, by rights, have been romping away like mad have been, frankly, weedy. The walnuts are all dead, as are a couple of the ornamental trees we planted, including the golden twisted willow that we planted on “tree o’clock” day back in 2009.

The thing that’s most galling is that the trees that have done best are the ashes. This photo is of one of these stars of our planting. They have grown from about 2 feet in height to 10-12 feet tall since 2007 – by far the most successful of all of the things we planted. We don’t know how long, if at all, they will continue to flourish because of this scary ash disease that’s now reached our shores. This may be the last time the trees bud and get leaves. Who knows? It may be that our labour (and money) were wasted and spent in vain on a project that was doomed to failure.

I’m sitting here choking back tears as I type because when I looked back through my blog to find when we did the planting, my photo from “tree o’clock” day ripped out my guts again. My beautiful girl. Gone. I suppose I am glad that I was able to document her life so comprehensively but boy, it’s like a knife to the gut seeing that photo.

So, I decided to choose this shot of the ash with Lola and her amazing pink tongue in the background. She sits waiting patiently for me to finish my shot and return my attention to her and her tennis ball. She’s now my girl and she’s very much here. Each day I share with her I am thankful for the day we met. She's my labour of love.