© Getty Images

Over the late summer, a fresh evening-stroll-route took me through a park with four formally-spaced, voluptuous rose beds: perhaps 20′ x 10′ in size with mebbie thirty tall bushes in each?

One of the many glories of roses is that by dead-heading them – snapping off the old bloom – another will be generated. The reward is a greatly extended season☆.

At the centre of these beds, separated by crossed paths, is a small fountain whose pool has been filled in with bedding plants. A fortnight or so after I’d begun the dead-heading, a couple of fierce muts along with their drug-dealing friends took to congregating there.

I’m far too lazy to go looking for trouble but if accosted by it, award it fairly short shrift. The dogs came a-snarling and backed away on being told off in Swedish for being so rude. That was followed by their owner, a spaced-out and emaciated skin-head, who shouted over at me. 

It was impossible to decipher what he said, so he was asked to repeat it in a manner one might understand. “Whaaaaaa youuuuuuuu killing vem flaaaaaarz?”

© RHS

Thrilled to pass on the lush joy implicit to dead-heading, I extolled its virtues in some considerable detail.

The dogs did not approach on subsequent occasions, nor did the group continue to gather for much longer at that spot.

☆ not just that, snapping the stem below the head feels even more satisfying than popping bubble-wrap.

☆☆ you may be assured I let the dreamy irony of life-extension amid life-curtailment waft into their plumes of wearisome smoke with suasive determination.