Boring post follows, with apologies

This is going to be a very boring post unless you happen to be me, since I'm the only person who really takes a close interest in my little garden. Apologies. I just wanted to look at how it was over four years - 2006-2009 - at about the same time. The only way I could think of doing this was posting four end-of-July photos, one from each year and all taken from about the same place. 2006 was when I started taking digital photos.

Above you see it in 2006. Lilac hedge far too big; yellow-and-white marguerites in foreground looking healthy, though in the process of being swamped by those yellow nettles.

In 2007, hedge has been cut down a lot. Marguerites are looking a bit less advanced, but still. promising. I had massacred the yellow nettles (though in 2009 they're beginning to fight back).

2008 - I must have foolishly planted these yellow flowers - what are they? coreopsis? rudbeckia? can't remember - to form a pleasing contrast to the marguerites.

2009. Big yellow flowers are now choking the marguerites. You can't see it from here but I had removed large amounts of b.y.fs further along, last year, and they've more or less grown back already. It's strange - I've had some for years and they've only recently started to take over. And look at the lilac hedge: getting much too big again. But when we cut it down, we lose the blossom.

I don't particularly like the destructive bit of gardening. I like planting things and doing a little gentle weeding.

I feel I should now write something more interesting in case anyone has actually read this, so here's what I thought was a rather telling little quote from "The Jane Austen Book Club" by Karen Joy Fowler, a well-written pleasant nonsense which I read and enjoyed on holiday: "Sylvia thought how all parents wanted an impossible life for their children - happy beginning, happy middle, happy ending. No plot of any kind. What uninteresting people would result if parents got their way."

I suppose it's true. And it's a bit comforting. Maybe it applies to gardening too.

Edited to add: Thimbleanna's comment made me ask myself what those white/yellow daisy flowers really are. The BBC gardening website seems to say that the white (swamped) ones which I know as marguerites are ox-eye daisies or possibly Shasta daisies; the invasive yellow ones do seem to be coreopsis; and it denies knowledge of the yellow nettley ones, known to me as yellow nettles. Come on, Kerri; come to my aid with your botanical wisdom. I do know the names of quite a lot of flowers but these ones are so common that one hardly needs the names - pointing usually does it.