I have been questioning why I made this garden. What was it that encouraged me turn a perfectly serviceable lawn, a place in which to play and rest, into a home for a stone terrace, topiary domes and climbing roses? Why did I plant an apple tree and a medlar and encourage wild strawberries to run
amok in the borders? And what exactly was my thinking behind the inclusion of two sets of yew hedges and a table of potted herbs? Details that inevitably involve more work than play.
You may also like
- Nigel Slater on planting failures
- I have a poisoned pot that kills everything
- Tour around Nigel Slater's garden
I am asking this because of the hours (and hours) I spend working in this garden, sweeping paths and deadheading roses, sowing nasturtiums and potting up pelargoniums, not to mention the time taken up by watering pots and fighting back skeins of marauding ivy, rather than simply relaxing on a rectangle of grass.
It is rare that my presence among the roses, cosmos and epimediums is ever for any reason other than work. Yes, I enjoy that work – few things give me more pleasure – but when did I last spend time reading a book in a deckchair or dozing off to the buzzing of bees and tweeting of robins? Surely that is what a garden is for.
Nurturing and raising plants is as much part of the ebb and flow of my life as baking a loaf or putting words on a page
I do love gardening. The hands-on practice of nurturing and raising plants in a green space has always been more than just a hobby for me. It is as much part of the ebb and flow of my life as baking a loaf or putting words on a page. The garden is very much my safe space, a place that is both healing and inspiring and something I think of as a benign influence. But I am also wondering how much time I actually spend breathing in this wonderful green landscape I have built, bathing in the dappled light left by the trees I have planted, or even just feasting my eyes on the unfurling ferns and curling rose petals. You see, right now, my time in the garden is all about working in the space rather than feasting on it. It is rather like cooking dinner (something I also enjoy) but without having the pleasure of eating it.
This, it now dawns on me, is where the truth really lies. The point of this place is never going to be the finished product to be viewed from a comfy chair, but for the hands-on labour involved. I can always find the time to prune the espaliered pear or trim an unruly bush of rosemary, but ask me if ever I just sit
in the garden and my response will be “Oh, I don’t have time for that”. Perhaps that is it, after all: maybe I don’t need to sit and soak up this space I have made.
What if the whole point of the garden was for the joy of pruning, potting and propagating? Maybe, just maybe, that is enough for me. This glorious thing we do, this nurturing and looking after living things, tying up a fallen delphinium or staking a dahlia whose bloom is too heavy for its stem – this
is what we need a garden for.
During the decade my urban space was used for growing vegetables and fruit, the reasons for its existence were more tangible. The occasional bowl of peas or basket of raspberries, bouquets of chard and heads of lettuce it produced were reason enough for the work involved. Putting a green salad on the table made up of butterhead lettuce, cucumber and sweet-sour ‘Gardener’s Delight’ tomatoes I had grown myself was reward enough for those hours of toil. But how to evaluate the effort
I put in now that the garden is more decorative than productive?
I can honestly say I have never sat in my garden for more than five minutes without spotting something that needs doing. Sitting there, glass of glowing Negroni in hand, it is barely a heartbeat before I pick up my snips or a ball of string. Strange though this may sound, it is the activity of making this garden, rather than any sense of accomplishment, that is its raison d’être. It is also, possibly, the reason I am constantly changing it, and why I won’t let this cosseted rectangle of land stand still.
These past few weeks, I have tried to make the effort to reap something of what I have sown by eating as many meals as possible at the table on the stone terrace, including breakfast, (despite it not really being warm enough at seven in the morning). Every time I stop for tea, I take the tray, teapot and cup outside, pull up a canvas chair and try to wallow in the scent and sight in front of me. Capacious cup in hand, I look and, increasingly listen, to this urban sanctuary. A reward, I suppose for all the cracked thumbs and scratched arms, the muddy boots and the pulled muscles. These sessions of ‘smelling the roses’ last all of ten minutes, then I spot a wayward clematis shoot and I am up and at it again.
It has taken me far too long to work out that I do this not for the finished product – the idea of a polished bucolic space in which to unwind – but for the work, the slog and the mess. It is a trowel and a pair of secateurs I need, not a garden seat and a cushion. I just wish I had known a little sooner.
