The Garden Blog

I am resisting opening a new category for garden notes. But I kind of want to. At the top of June 2022, I showed the state of the garden to my partner, who said it looked like a “dark mysterious glade,” so in my head the garden is The Glade now.

It’s not a big garden. When my daughter left for university – nearly ten years, now! – we stopped maintaining it beyond keeping the lawn down and controlling the edges a bit. And then, one morning in early June, I stopped on my way back from feeding the chickens and actually looked around for the first time in years. And realised it was a death forest. A handful of plants performing Darwinian murder on everything around them, and empty beds with morbid soil. That past Xmas, I’d been bought a countertop hydroponic propagator because I’d been bemoaning a lack of fresh herbs for the kitchen. Nine years earlier, I’d bought a plastic mini greenhouse after a health scare but had never assembled the bloody thing.

So I went out with secateurs and trowels and old kitchen shears and a rusty saw, and went to work on clearing the garden, raising plants in the propagator and potting them in the mini greenhouse.

Pictured is the lilac tree that finally dropped its foliage, which will make it easier to cut back. The garden is largely black and green right now.

Gardening is an art. It’s inherently a creative act, that supports my other creative acts. It’s also, for me, a horticultural therapy practise. A living notebook. For me, it entirely fits within the ambit of this site. And now, it’s the start of my first full year of including the garden in my creative work. (Because, previously, the garden was included in the life of parenting, which is a related but very different thing.) So notes on the garden will appear here too, being folded into the stream of my creative life. There will be complaints about snails.