Secret Gardening

Over the past few months, I've attempted to write a blog but never finished. The whole life thing is going backwards, and I haven't felt like chronicling my ongoing failures. Any self-respecting novelist would fast forward to the turning point of the saga, with a couple of paragraphs in which the protagonist reflects on the bleakness of the intervening years and what they've lost along the way.

Reflecting on bleakness in real time is tedious, but blogging is therapeutic for me. Fortunately, I'm not an influencer, and I don't have a brand to maintain. So now and for the foreseeable future, this is a Gardening Blog.

The garden has been the silver lining of my unemployment: a fantastically constructive diversion that lets me escape from my issues while still feeling like I'm making progress with something. It's a fully landscaped, rampantly overgrown jungle of native and exotic  plants, which I am trying to mould into something that suits us.

 

The story of my garden really begins in 2001, when the house was bought by a retiree who had travelled extensively during the course of her career and wished to recreate various garden styles she had seen overseas. Based on what lies over the neighbour's hedge, I presume the original garden was just a simple slope of grass, with perhaps a tree or two, and the inevitable paved rectangle of patio at the back door. Under the Retiree's supervision, the grassy slope became a geometric series of tiers with themed flowerbeds separated by a gridwork of paths that would make a Roman proud.

However, over the next fifteen years, the Retiree's health declined, and she was unable to tend her garden. The ornamental plants that survived expanded well beyond their designated territory while native plants doggedly reclaimed ground. 

The next owners were a young family, keen to have a go at the wilderness. They tidied up the main paths, eliminated some hazards, planted some fruit trees and defined the outdoor spaces they wanted. When they moved out, the mother thoughtfully left a letter detailing what she knew about the garden: a starting guide for the new owners. Us.

Here is the garden when we took it over, brown and dormant in midwinter.

Spoiler alert, the Family was much better at keeping everything tidy than I am.

The Retiree left a legacy of hydrangeas and roses... I seem to discover one or the other every month. (OK, some of them are probably ones I found before and forgot about; the point is, there are enough for that!) The Family's garden told a tale of children at play: I have a small collection of plastic toys that I've excavated from flower beds including a shark and a dinosaur. Also the swing on the pergola which was a stroke of genius.

 

The pergola leads from the lawn to the terrace at the back of the garden. For the Retiree, this was the site of an ornamental pond; for the Family, it was the location for a greenhouse; for Me it's the secret base of the briars that have annexed all land within six feet of the back fence. On occasion, I sally forth with my loppers, and the ensuing carnage results in thorny cuttings all over the terrace. Most are swept into the garden waste bag, but many escape my broom by falling into the cracks of the paving stones. In other words, the terrace is a booby-trapped no-man's land, where even the cat refuses to walk.

 

The Briars (mostly rambling roses but some brambles have enlisted as well) would probably take over the entire garden, but they're in a stand-off with the Wild Wood that is, in theory, an ornamental border along the fence. I assumed it was a single row of large shrubs and trees, until my parents peered into it and spotted camellias blooming at the back. We cut down a large box shrub to reveal them... sort of.

 They were clearly planted for winter colour, but they were barely visible and struggling for light. By summer, when the weigela had leafed and blossomed, it was even worse. 

A year later, I still haven't made it to the camellias, I still have to google the spelling of weigela, and I honestly have no idea what's in the very back corner as any path is barred by a wall of holly and bay tree. 

 

I recently pulled a three metre rose briar out of the tangle. The proper dramatic convention would have been for some clue to the mysteries beyond to emerge with it, snagged upon the thorns: a bone, a priceless artefact, a note from a long-lost castaway....  Sadly, my rambling roses are habitually inconsiderate and failed to bring back the loot.

While the Briars and the Wild Wood remain disputed territory, the young family made the rest of the garden safely accessible, even if the flower beds are still wildly overcrowded in summer. Between the pergola and the Wild Wood stands the Scarlet Grove a.k.a. the Bloody Grove a.k.a. the Emo Grove. 

 All summer long, it's a blaze of reds and hot pinks, which effectively draw the eye when you're looking up the garden from the conservatory or patio. See the below picture, taken from the patio two months later, when the lantern tree was fading but (to its right) the poppies were in neon bloom.

A sea of ornamental grass (and random individual flowers, struggling to stay afloat) divides the lawn area from the landscaping, concealing the gravel paths. We've named it Trog's Savannah, because he used to love sitting around there, chewing on the grasses and basking in the sunlight. 

The Retiree had a shed with attached greenhouse between the grasses and the lawn. The shed is still in use, but the Family tore the old greenhouse down as it was in dangerous disrepair. Over its foundation, they laid down mulch to create a play area for their children. My kids being older, we weren't sure what to do with the space, so we put down our pond-in-a-pot and stacked random garden stones (mostly found in the garage) around it. By the end of the summer, the whole area had been claimed by a jungle of giant weeds; one of this year's tasks is to excavate our own pond.

In front of the mulch is a small lawn, which brings us back to the first picture, because I don't have an updated overview: 

 

The lawn is a nice space for sitting on (but not a huge mowing commitment), with interest provided by ever more borders. The Retiree must be responsible for the inexplicable stand of bamboo (kept effortlessly out of shot by the egocentric spindle tree), but the front and rear flowerbeds may have been partly replanted by the Family: there are quite a few herbs and tactile plants popular in modern sensory gardens for young children.

 

Up until I acquired this secretive beast of a garden, I thought I didn't like gardening and wasn't any good at it. My chief (only) asset was my avidly horticultural parents, and it was on the strength of this resource that I took the plunge and bought the house. They have proved invaluable for plant identification and as an interim source of garden tools. Most of my house maintenance expenses have been on buying the necessary equipment to manage the garden.

Fortunately the most difficult and expensive part has been done for me. Thanks to the retiree, I've inherited a full collection of plants laid out to provide colour and interest year round, all of which are hardy enough to survive neglect, along with literal tonnes of landscaping material (which has fortunately been distributed in smaller weights throughout the garden). With so many resources at my disposal, my creativity has run wild, and after a year of furious internet-based self-education, I'm feeling ambitious....

 

There's a favourite quote of mine that I've always used figuratively. Now I'm taking it literally, revelling in a hobby without deadlines.* 

"Live as if you are going to die tomorrow; Garden as if you are going to live forever." 

         – Rudyard Kipling

* NB: Gardening is technically full of deadlines: tasks that must be done by a certain time of year or at a specific stage of the plant's development. I'm just ignoring them, secure in the knowledge that if the garden's survived this long, it can survive me.