The Menace of the Border

This monstrous being, dominating its region of the border of my garden along the old wall, is a pampas grass. I ought to have known before, as it's common enough, but I I asked my gardener friend Ms Quercus to identify it for me. To call it 'grass' seems inappropriate: no element of it coincides with one's (British) vision of what grass normally is. I don't clearly remember having done anything to this plant since I arrived here more than ten years ago, though I may have moderately restrained its insistent encroachments on the path once. 

So over the last couple of days I've attempted to tackle it as the RHS suggests, removing the dead flowers and 'combing out' the dry leaves. You'd need quite a comb: even the rake isn't really up to it, and I found I needed to employ my favourite garden implement of all time, the billhook. Under the upper layers of fresh green growth were columns of curling, dry, and ultimately, when you got deeper, rotting vegetation well on the way to becoming compost: that needed to be pulled out. That done and the pampas reduced to the bits of it that were actually alive, I cut some of it back. We finished the process with the shrub's appearance much improved, but I didn't get away unscathed: pampas's razor-like leaves are designed to inflict damage on predators, and my interaction with this one resulted in wrists that looked like I'd had a desperate episode of self-harm and a cut on my forehead when a stray leaf had slapped me like a Triffid.

Worryingly, there is an urban legend that the plant used to be installed as a signal that the householders were into swinging. I don't want to imagine which of my predecessors might have thought along those lines, but if they did they would only have had about three sets of neighbours along one side to choose from.